Karel Doing

In Vivo

DCP
61 minutes
colour and b/w
2021

soundtrack: Gareth Davis

instruments and vocals:
Anna Homler
Blanca Regina

Screenings:

BISFF (Busan)
Alchemy (Hawick)
Split Film Festival (Split)
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (Seoul)
Star & Shadow (Newcastle)
Media Wave (Kiscsösz)
EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam)
Cube Cinema (Bristol)
Close Up Cinema (London)


essay by Michael Pattison

 

Reality has countless layers, many of these will remain invisible to the untrained eye. In this elegy humans appear like ants, walking around their habitat in a preprogrammed way, while animals and plants act like individuals. This upside-down world has a strange attraction which is at once alienating and deeply familiar.

The surface of the film material itself is present like a skin that breathes and interacts with the living world in manifold ways: grainy, ephemeral, tinted, vibrating. Time and space are blurred into a reality that is both specific and universal. The film is simultaneously a documentary, a home movie and a symphony. We see scraps of the filmmakers' personal history including encounters with his friends and family. But beyond those commonplace scenes, the film offers an unusual encounter with the real, embedded in a delicate composition of images and sounds.

This is not a journey from A to B but rather a dive into the swirling yet nurturing waters of an ocean. If there is a story to be told than it is an unfortunate one. A recurring doomsday clock is counting down, reminding us that in the here and now species are disappearing rapidly from the planet. How long does it take to realise that our destructive behaviour is irreversible and threatens to destroy everything we love?