LIKE KINTSUGI (2018)

GENRE: SHORT ESSAY FILM
RUNNING TIME: 20' 
FORMAT: DIGITAL FILM + ANALOGUE AND ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHS
ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK BY AGATHE MAX
CREATED DURING THE WEIGHT OF MOUNTAINS RESIDENCY IN SKAGASTRÖND, ICELAND (2014) & EDITED IN DETROIT, USA AT THE MOTHLIGHT MICROCINEMA RESIDENCY (2016)
WATCH TEASER

DESCRIPTION: 
The universe is infinite both as a whole and in each one of its fractions, whether a star or a grain of dust. And so, as it is at this present moment, it likewise already was, and so it will always be, without an atom or second of variation. There’s nothing new under the sun. 
Louis-Auguste Blanqui (Eternity by the Stars, 1871)
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And so goes an ordinary day, in an ordinary town in the North of Iceland. History quietly repeats itself and meanwhile, astral bodies collide, fall in and out of love, and a proto-feminist myth buries a call to arms in the Spákonufell mountain.

Gazing at images of the stark, indeed sublime, Icelandic landscape one may be moved to ponder the persistence of snowed-capped peaks and tundra-like plains, yet Ross reminds us of the transience of all matter; that in the end even the mountains are not eternal; that the only constant is impermanence and ephemerality. All is perishable, “stars are born, they shine and they go out.” The consistency across time and space, then, is our drive toward coherence, our desire to mend the broken pot or suture the stories together, to practice an alchemy that turns fragments of time and place into gold. Reinforced by a haunting score, Ross does just that. She weaves the fragments of image, sound, and story into an assemblage that celebrates the coalescences of meaning; the ways in which we collide with each other like celestial beings and from these collisions form vessels of meaning mended with gold.
Julia Yezbick (curator of Mothlight Microcinema and anthropology lecturer at Harvard University)