aBOUT THEIR DISTANCE (2023)
Through fragmented dreamlike landscapes and cityscapes, About their distance (2023) addresses the fluid margins between dreams and reality, challenging conventional perceptions of place, time and location. Flickering overlays of filmed footage and animated scenes intertwine seamlessly; framing, tunnelling, reflections and flatness are interrogated as signifiers for introspection.
The soothing narrative provides a poetic meditation on the nature of dreams and the interstitial quality they evoke, filled with evocative imagery and introspective dialogue. Using the concept of anime pilgrimages as a basis - that is, visits to real life locations that showed up in animated realms - About their distance considers the act of standing in a place and time but gazing at somewhere else, and the entanglements and possibilities that can bring about. Central to the film is the exploration of how dreams are embedded in the mundane and the extraordinary alike, looping inwards on themselves collecting memories and cultural artefacts as they go. Like the "other place" that one hopes to see at the pilgrimage location, the dream has a similar elusive and spectral quality; recalling dreams becomes an invocation of the fictional where precise details and data are lossily presented. The film's visual language, rich with screen wipes, ominous and optimistic music and shifting perspectives, captures the dislocated, semi-opaque, expansive quality of dreams and the voids and gaps that rise between them. About their distance disperses and suspends time, leading to somewhere not here. Running time: 14 min subtitled in ENGLISH or JAPANESE watch below ↓ with ENG and Japanese subtitles watch my conversation about the work with Patrick W. Galbraith below ↓ |