Volcano: what does a lake dream?

Vulcão: O Que Sonha um Lago? (Portuguese dialogues, with English/French subtitles)

21mins, Super 16mm, color &b/w, 5,1 Surround Sound

Selections & Awards: Locarno International Film Festival - Pardi di domani: Concorso internazionale 2019, Chicago International Film Festival - Documentary Short Competition, DocLisboa - Portuguese Competition, Winterthur Kurzfilmtage - International Competition, Kasseler DokFest, Imagine Science NYC Film Festival - Awarded the Visual Science Award 2019, London Short Film Festival, Kino Pavasaris Vilnius International Film Festival - Short Film Competition, EMAF Osnabrück, 2020, VideoEX Film Festival Zurich 2020, Uppsala Short Film Festival 2021, For the Love of Celluloid Award 2024 Images Film Festival Toronto.

Distribution : Collectif Jeune Cinéma Paris

With: Catarina Dias Da Rosa, João Paulo Constância, Nuno Pereira, Alice Garcia De Melo.

Director: Diana Vidrascu Original screenplay: Diana Vidrascu, Johan Härnsten Music: Mondkopf Produced by: Diana Vidrascu, Jesse James, Sofia Carolina Botelho (WALK&TALK Azores) Sound Designer: Romain Poirier

SYNOPSIS

Volcanoes erupt from the depths of the boiling earth to the surface of the celluloid film, to create a new abstract cinematographic language.

In her new film, Diana Vidrascu carries out an impressive aesthetic and photographic research while mixing mythological and scientific narratives and performing an extraordinary soundwork. Lulled by the stories told by the protagonists, we are caught up in these images of nature that transform into a disturbing but exciting, unreal and uncontrollable world. (Charlotte Corchète, Locarno Film Festival)

STATEMENT

The Azores archipelago is composed of nine volcanic islands situated on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, at the junction of three slowly diverging continental plates. Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? draws its visual energy from this complex tectonic area. Volcanism proves to be central on a thematic as well as a formal level: what starts out as a quiet documentary about the islands and their inhabitants progressively turns into an eruptive cinematographic experiment where the film itself ultimately risks destruction.

The four Azorean voices in the film include an islander’s personal narrative of forced migration following the 1980 earthquake in São Jorge, a museum curator describing the birth of the volcanic island Sabrina in 1811, a geologist’s reflection on memory and geological time, and an eyewitness account of the eruption of Capelinhos in 1957-1958. Together, they convey a complex image of the specifically Azorean experience of time, in which human history is regularly disrupted by seismic forces.

The film uses infrared photography, which makes the lush foliage of the islands appear in magenta. Capturing radiation invisible to the human eye, Kodak Aerochrome was originally designed for military purposes, as it allowed the detection of enemies hiding in the vegetation. In Volcano, it instead reflects an infra-terrestrial dimension of reality, revealing the magmatic origin of the islands. Shot with a slow, computer-controlled camera movement, the infrared photography of Sete Cidades seems to unveil a prehistoric past, or perhaps predict a distant future, both uncannily devoid of human presence.

Alongside the apocalyptic magenta, the film also operates with a red lens filter on the 16mm camera, which transforms the ocean into boiling lava. These sequences have an accelerating function within the narrative timeframe, foreboding a cataclysmic event. And indeed, a celluloid eruption does take place. Following the geological structure of the “spreading center” occurring at the boundary between tectonic plates, the images disquietingly begin to shiver and dissolve, opening up volcanic rifts within the film frame itself. Using the matte technique and an Oxberry optical printer for these special effects, Diana Vidrașcu lets lava-like flows of images burst out through the cracks in the film. The different timelines collide and overlap, finally yielding only pulsating white light.

The ethereal last sequence of the film, shot at sunset above the crater lake Lagoa do Fogo in São Miguel, captures the emergence of a Brocken spectre – an optical phenomenon occurring when the shadow of the observer, surrounded by a halo of backscattered light, is cast upon a cloud opposite the sun. What does a lake dream, above the dormant volcano? When asked, the Lake of Fire significantly chooses to withdraw into the mist, and instead of answering offers its own projection, fleetingly showing us the ghostlike image of ourselves.

Johan Härnsten