Two boys and a girl, archetypes on a paganistic journey in which nature guides the senses and emotions. Minimal dialogue, silence, sounds. Fear, freedom, instinct, desire, pansexuality and always the feeling that something’s looking down from above. Filmed using the video function of a digital photographic camera, imbued with the uncanny and packed with intense hues and violent forms, In the Woods is an existential fairytale red in tooth and claw. A film as elemental as stone, as water or the sky.
Director’s note
This is not a love song
…this sense of worship we always reserve for those who have
no qualms about exercising their ability to cause us pain
Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way
The babe in the cradle waves its arm and thinks the whole world’s moving. His mother’s singing and the baby does not know it’s silent. The world is one. Indivisibly. The babe will learn to distinguish in a while. To comprehend its needs. That it and its mother are separate creatures. The pain! Everything’s fragmented. Everyone’s alone.
Two boys and a girl. Quite alone. Trying to come together. To become one again. Around them, huge tree trunks, translucent rivers, an isolated beach, the mountains, and an uncanny red house buried deep in the woods. Why is it there? Who has abandoned them to innocently hurt each other so very much? What is this strange sexual urge exuding from the trees, the water, the leaves? Are they free or trapped? There are no answers. Their journey’s like an initiation. As our journey was when we made this film.
Like children abandoned in the woods by our parents, our experience in nature transcended us. For two months, we slept in tents and ate by the light of the campfire. Without a script, we made the film with the actors day by day, marking the passage of time on our own personal calendar. The trunks determined our thoughts and guided our gaze. A crew of five plus three actors. Our equipment: a consumer digital photographic camera (we used its video function to film the entire movie), a sound recorder and a laptop.
This instinctive approach to dramaturgy demanded an equivalent shooting method that left us free of technical restrictions.
The decision to use a lo-fi digital camera instead of a proper camera imposed a new mode of filming. It allowed me to get in ever closer with my little camera: reach-out-and-touch close, wanting-to become-one-with-them close. To lick the stones or make love to the sand. And other times to train a narrow-angle lens on the bodies, like a documentary on the senses. But making contact, not removed like a voyeur. With the same desire to touch, to kiss, to bite, to become one. To rapturously escape the bounds of oneness. A sexual recording mode for a film about the materiality of emotions. Like a Fauvist painting with its deliberate outlines, intense coloration and violent forms.
Angelos Frantzis
info
Director’s note
This is not a love song
…this sense of worship we always reserve for those who have
no qualms about exercising their ability to cause us pain
Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way
The babe in the cradle waves its arm and thinks the whole world’s moving. His mother’s singing and the baby does not know it’s silent. The world is one. Indivisibly. The babe will learn to distinguish in a while. To comprehend its needs. That it and its mother are separate creatures. The pain! Everything’s fragmented. Everyone’s alone.
Two boys and a girl. Quite alone. Trying to come together. To become one again. Around them, huge tree trunks, translucent rivers, an isolated beach, the mountains, and an uncanny red house buried deep in the woods. Why is it there? Who has abandoned them to innocently hurt each other so very much? What is this strange sexual urge exuding from the trees, the water, the leaves? Are they free or trapped? There are no answers. Their journey’s like an initiation. As our journey was when we made this film.
Like children abandoned in the woods by our parents, our experience in nature transcended us. For two months, we slept in tents and ate by the light of the campfire. Without a script, we made the film with the actors day by day, marking the passage of time on our own personal calendar. The trunks determined our thoughts and guided our gaze. A crew of five plus three actors. Our equipment: a consumer digital photographic camera (we used its video function to film the entire movie), a sound recorder and a laptop.
This instinctive approach to dramaturgy demanded an equivalent shooting method that left us free of technical restrictions.
The decision to use a lo-fi digital camera instead of a proper camera imposed a new mode of filming. It allowed me to get in ever closer with my little camera: reach-out-and-touch close, wanting-to become-one-with-them close. To lick the stones or make love to the sand. And other times to train a narrow-angle lens on the bodies, like a documentary on the senses. But making contact, not removed like a voyeur. With the same desire to touch, to kiss, to bite, to become one. To rapturously escape the bounds of oneness. A sexual recording mode for a film about the materiality of emotions. Like a Fauvist painting with its deliberate outlines, intense coloration and violent forms.
Angelos Frantzis
info
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