Substanz

A desolate, deserted landscape in which metal, stone and dust merge and bodies walk around like spirits. This is Japan in 2011, three weeks after the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear disaster. The camera looks through the eyes of filmmaker Sebastian Mez, confused, grabbing random images that later on, during the editing, tumble over each other and refuse to stand still. It’s a catastrophic collage of continuous gray because everything is covered in dust. And among all those pictures, death is hanging around. Buildings look like collapsed miniatures. Soldiers and cranes are cleaning up the debris. There are faces in demonstrations against nuclear energy, newsreaders, a nocturnal journey, the neon lights of a city that is still standing. Each selection of images is random, so what do they show after a disaster? Do they reduce the distance to reality? Do they create order? Do they reveal the reality? By overlapping images and sounds, lets the viewer get lost just as Mez did in 2011 in the chaos of an unknown country that has declared a state of emergency. Paradoxically, of all possible orderings of the images, a montage like this could very well be the most truthful.