Tag: desert

Tallinn 2022 Kids Animation Programme – part 3

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Self-contained fable Birth Of The Oases (Marion Jamault, France, 9 mins) is a near-perfect portrayal of a symbiotic relationship. The cold-blooded hilltop snake struggles to keep warm while the two-humped camel is constantly exhausted by the desert’s heat. They come to a mutually helpful agreement whereby the cold snake takes up residence on the camel’s humps. This warms up the snake and cools down the camel. After the camel dies from old age, the snake moves around the sand dunes – here designed to look like a never ending series of camels humps – to create first water and later full blown oases which, according to the armadillo revealed as the narrator at the very end, to this very day.

In the black and white classroom of the black and white world of The Boy And The Elephant (Sonia Gerbeaud, France, 7 mins), black and white kids taunt someone who is different – a boy with an elephant head who is coloured blue. One kid, though, takes an interest – a boy who is coloured red, and the two embark on a playground friendship which could be read as a gay relationship, a state threatened by the red boy’s need to conform and revert to fit in with the black and whites. Eventually, a black and white girl takes pity on the elephant head, accepts him and he is subsumed into the group.

Marea (Guilia Martinelli, Switzerland, 5 mins) is another self-contained fable about a family living on an island within an hermetically sealed dome.

Stop-frame marvel Laika & Nemo (Jan Gaderman/Sebastian Gadow, Germany, 15 mins), arguably my favourite film in the programme, again concerns an outsider – a boy who lives in a lighthouse who is regularly tormented by fellow pupils and local fishermen at the harbour for wearing deep sea diving gear. When an astronaut crashes his spaceship near the lighthouse, the two helmet-wearers bond which puts them in a good place for when one of those local fishermen drops a key into the harbour.

Last but not least, The Queen Of The Foxes (Marina Rosset, Switzerland, 9 mins) is a French tale about the saddest member of a group of foxes who is, perhaps for that reason, made their queen. The other foxes’ inability to write hampers their attempts at writing such a letter to cheer her up. Instead, they steal from the nearby town all the love letters people have never been brave enough to send, delivering one which results in the uniting of a happy human couple who write their own letter to the fox queen thanking her for their efforts, which finally does the trick. The foxes then deliver the other letters, and the town windows suddenly become full of lively couples, straight, gay, even a threesome.

Which goes to show that programmes of kids animation can be a lot dirtier than you might expect.

The third of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Fragments From Heaven

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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The desert, in its bleak, existential emptiness, offers man the chance to discover his destiny. There’s a reason Moses didn’t travel through lush vegetation and rolling hills for 40 days. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing before suddenly something. Something quite remarkable indeed. Perhaps the origin of all human life.

My opening oversells Fragments From Heaven somewhat, a poetic, if slight, documentary from Morocco with two complimentary strands: firstly, the story of Mohamed, a nomad who pursues the desert for meteorite debris, believing it has the power to change his life, and Abderrahmane, a scientist who is exploring the origin of these rocks in order to answer questions about the Big Bang itself. Combining long takes with ambient sound design, and heated discussions with Terrence Malick-style voiceover, this documentary takes you on a quest, touching on topics both scientific and existential.

There are shades of Werner Herzog’s recent geographically-minded documentaries here, such as Into The Inferno (2018) and Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) — looking at the physical world in order to understand the man-made one. But Adnane Baraka’s film — which he shot, edited, and sound-designed himself — has no conventional talking heads and a much smaller scope and budget, keeping its perspective relatively close. It begs to be seen in a cinema, considering the experiential duration of the desert-set takes, following characters around as they look for these rare meteorite fragments. At home on a computer screen, your attention may easily wane.

We learn back in Abderrahmane’s research centre, that not only are these fragments potentially millions of years old, but they actually pre-date the sun itself. At one point, we even learn that some fragments have organic matter on them, briefly begging the question that there may be life elsewhere in the universe. In one discussion with his students, he even argues that understanding these fragments could be the key to understanding how the universe began. Given the importance of the work, someone needs to give this man more funding right away!

He is the classic scientist, speaking French, while Mohamed, speaking Amazigh, working on the ground with his wife and children, is far more religious-minded. And while the two subjects never meet, they do seem to be in dialogue with one another, creating an interesting tension between faith and science. Perhaps the final answer still resides in the stars?

Ending with a Tree Of Life-like (Terrence Malick, 2011) evocation of the sun burning and lights flaring and fire piercing the cosmos, Baraka finally aims for profundity and awe — reminding us of the infinite potential of the universe around us, small shards of which are more likely to collect in the Moroccan desert than almost anywhere else on earth. Nonetheless, these moments do come after plenty of ponderous takes. There is a lot to think about, but a lot of wading through the desert is needed to get there.

Fragments From Heaven plays as part of Concorso Cineasti del presente at the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.