The Sower of Stars |
by Lois Patiño
Spain, 2021, 25 min
Tokyo at night is dazzling, a fantasy of hypnotizing lights. Observed with distance and stillness, if you let yourself be carried away by them, you can find a meditative atmosphere there. The first thing I tried to capture was this peaceful feeling, hidden within the vertigo of a megalopolis like Tokyo.
I worked on the image with two plastic references that emerged very quickly: Zen landscape painting -from where I could underline the idea of emptiness and silence- and the cyberpunk aesthetics of films like Blade Runner -to build futuristic neon architectures by superimposing planes-.
From this atmosphere I began to think the story. I am always interested in the limbo space between life and death, imaginary and real, where the borders between both blur to make the spectral and dreamlike emerge. I wanted the story to pass through this ideas, giving shape to it from a dialogue of disembodied voices. Voices that cross the city-limbo while being both outside and inside the image, as a kind of depersonalization.
I constructed the dialogues from a certain poetic crypticism inspired by the koan -mystical teachings of Zen Buddhism-. And they gradually settled down, from readings, in a script more of an editor than a writer, like a book of aphorisms that keeps little jewels. Very condensed thoughts related mainly to contemplation, because this was the biggest challenge for me here: to find a balance between narration and contemplation, between text and image, ensuring that they enhance each other, despite each one demands a different attention from us: one more sensitive, the other more rational.