Competition: Inside The Outset - Evoking A Space of Passage

Director: Rosa Barba
Italy, 2020, 31’, HDD, Color 

In parallel with the inauguration of the open-air cinema, Rosa Barba will present Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), a new film shot in Cyprus. Through its atmospheric manoeuvring of the island’s politically charged landscapes, the film subverts its Aphroditesque persona. The lens’ perception is that of a careful, curious, and observant visitor, almost as if to allow the island to speak for itself and its complexity: Flamingos charge as if to serve in Nature’s army in unison with the adolescent Cypriot boys, poignant sirens and Neolithic idols disrupt the narrative with an iconoclastic force, and the landscape fondles with the hopeful as it extends horizontally in a way so as to suggest it could go on for eternity. The camera, through its liquid honesty, wades through and comments on the serrated tautness between the captured, the capturing, the captivated, and the captivating. The landscape finds itself in a process of reconciliation with its haunted presence through the music. The score characterizes the odd polarity of the island as it picks up on its natural oscillation from patience to impatience and vice versa with a kind of acute urgency and anxiety similar to the sea urchins laying on its seabed.