Part III of the World in Short section screened at the Kinodvor Cinema last night. After the screenings, representatives of the Kraken Society, Peter Cerovšek and Matevž Jerman, hosted Radej Jakub, Polish director of Dust, who decided to make the semi-documentary film about what happens to a human body several hours before death and until burial for several reasons. Among others because death is tabooed and marginalised, and because he wanted to deviate from the themes of his previous films. Primarily he wanted to evoke certain feelings, dealing with our common future – we will all die one day. “If we fear our own death, we sort of fear our own life,” he added, thus referring to Alan Watts, whose voice was used for the off-screen narration in one of the featured animated films, David O'Reilly’s Everything. Most of the time the filmmaker and his crew were not overwhelmed by the gravity of their subject; it wasn’t until the last day that the acuteness of the events they had witnessed confounded them.

The film was technically challenging; numerous Polish institutions declined Jakuba’s filmmaking request on account of some past affairs (on one occasion ashes had vanished from a mortuary). They nonetheless found some institutions that did not object to filming because, according to Jakub, “there had nothing to hide”.

The filmmaker also revealed that his films were invariably sad and gloomy. “I’d like to surpass that, but it won’t be easy,” he admitted.

Andraž Jež

Photo Iztok Dimc