MOUNTAIN IN SHADOW – Interview with LOIS PATIÑO: “The man is only a part of a whole… a kind of transitional fade. We are no longer in a waking state, but in a state of reverie in which the ends of the identity vanish.”

Luciana Dumitru: MOUNTAIN IN SHADOW moves to more abstract images as they unfold, from the more romantic take in the most of your videos. What did you find interesting in this approach?

OUR DAYS, ABSOLUTELY, HAVE TO BE ENLIGHTENED – Interview with JEAN-GABRIEL PÉRIOT: “I really believe in the power of music as a tool to share emotions. I thought those voices, coming up from a closed place, will be enough to move the audience.”

Oana Ghera: I know that OUR DAYS, ABSOLUTELY, HAVE TO BE ENLIGHTENED started as a piece of performance art, a concert you worked out with the inmates, but I was curious to know how did you go from that to the experimental documentary that is Our Days…?

RIVER RITES – Interview with BEN RUSSELL: “I never thought about film as a tool for translation but rather as a way of conjuring, as a means for bringing the unseen out of the shadows and transforming time into a body that we all could understand.”

Luciana Dumitru: Michel de Certeau writes about the experience of a French travel writer, Jean de Léry, in Tupi, using the term “remainder” for that which couldn’t be translated (into words). In Léry’s case, the overwhelming (subjective) aural and visual pleasures, from the language he couldn’t understand and strange sounds to the visceral experiences of being surrounded by naked bodies. De Certeau says “proximity is presence without possession.”  In your experience of living within the community of Saramaccan animists can you talk about “remainders” that you wanted to pin down? If so, how did film help you? More importantly, what are the “remainders” of this film – RIVER RITES (which is different from the lived experience)?