THE LIFE OF OTHERS

The creators of the YARAT! Film Club saw it as a place for informal meetings and intellectual debate and somewhere to talk about the contemporary cinema and art-video. Approaching it, one is reminded about a line from one of Bulat Okujava's poems: "Let's join hands, my dear friends; we won't get lost if we're together!"  And that's very much to the point, because if people in the metropolis are completely separated it gives rise to all kinds of problems. It seems that we have forgotten how to spend time together; I don't mean eating in restaurants and discussing different problems, but getting together informally, watching a film, and discussing it together afterwards. And these reflections are not just an attempt to get into the author's mind, but also to listen to what others have to say. I believe events like these are simply essential - for us and for our children.

Contacts of this nature could prove to be of mutual interest and beneficial, too, because they will provide an additional opportunity to preserve that which we have not yet entirely lost. By that I mean a link between the generations, understanding and respect for one another and the preservation of our common culture which implies, first and foremost, a realization of what today we call the perceptual characteristic of our nation.  

Delving into the philosophy of life

Shezad Dawood's film "Piercing Brightness" was shown at the second meeting of the film club, which was organized jointly with the British Council Azerbaijan. 

Shezad Dawood is British of Pakistani origin, now lives and works in London and is a research fellow in experimental media at the University of Westminster. He graduated from Central St. Martin's and the Royal College of Art and Design and later completed a PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University. He now works across film, painting and sculpture to juxtapose systems of image, language, site and multiple narratives to explore meanings and forms between film and painting.

The director has crammed a great deal into his 40-plus years, travelling around the world and studying different types of art and people, their ways and their philosophy of life. In making "Piercing Brightness", he spent a year feeling his way in a community of Chinese people who are rapidly becoming part of the town of Preston (in Lancashire).

This is not a whim on the author's part, nor a diversion, but a desire to understand and study the process of what is happening which in some mystical way is also linked with the fact that it is here, in the county of Lancashire, that the most sightings of UFOs have been recorded. It is here that the Chinese community is rapidly growing and, judging from the film, the author can detect some kind of mythical link here.

About the film

"Piercing Brightness" is a film which could hardly be included in the science fiction genre, as some people in the media have been quick to say. Nor could it be described as an epic film. The lack of a clearly defined plot against a set of events, with no conceptual view on the heart of the problem, as well as an attempt to squeeze into 70 minutes of action questions of ecology, the biosphere, metaphysics and mysticism, which may today be regarded as moral or even spiritual problems, have produced a rather weird effect.  

The elements of documentary film, interspersed with clips of real action, lead one to believe that everything that is going on is merely the course of life on Earth which is being observed, closely studied and surveyed by those whom we never see. But this invisible eye is always here - on the other side of the lens.

The film is an attempt to take another look at a subject which has already been raised a number of times in the world cinema with great success. We are not alone on our small planet Earth. Parallel worlds, extra-terrestrial intelligence, aliens and stars - they are all interwoven!

The chief protagonists in the film are Chinese, or to be more precise, beings who have settled into the bodies of Chinese people. They have arrived on Earth from a star to establish contact with those who conquered long ago and are perfectly at home in the limits of earth time and reality.

After landing on Earth from a starship in the county of Lancashire, a boy and a girl of Chinese appearance have to find a team of emissaries who landed here a thousand years ago with a mission to study the planet. In these thousand years the emissaries have undergone several reincarnations and have managed to genetically adhere to this planet, where sometimes even deformities have an attractive and alluring appearance. But because such a long period of time has had a very serious effect on the state not only of genetic memory, but also on the very genetic code of the child-agents sent to Earth, then naturally, they no longer have a wish to return home. However, the boy-agent who has arrived is also not averse to trying out everything that is banned or corrupt on this planet! And, apparently, it is very much to his liking.

The author's view of the problem linked with the "invasion" of a yellow-skinned race into the bounds of the habitat of Europeans is almost metaphorical. If we recall Euripides' "Lysistrata", then we could claim that over so many centuries the problem is no nearer to being solved. And now Italy is progressively taking in dark-skinned refugees, as well as illegal migrants from Moldova and Ukraine. And the Chinese are being successfully assimilated in great continents - Eurasia and America. Incidentally, the great migration of peoples began when the global boat started to rock with all its might.

They are among us

"Piercing Brightness" is, at first glance, a strange title, at least from the Russian language point of view. Why should brightness be piercing? According to the Russian dictionary, the word piercing means nothing more than penetrating, i.e. penetrating deep inside something. Brightness, however, is a luminous power aimed at the projection of a surface. So, that means we are talking about a phenomenon penetrating deep into the structure of terrestrial life capable of piercing all material and non-material things on Earth, including human beings - minds, spirits, hearts. Often in the picture we see flights of birds - either black, flying in a huge swarm over the roofs of houses, as in Bekmambetov's film "Night Watch", for example, or white, flying in formation in the sky and then, as in Hitchcock's "The Birds", landing on the camera lens. In the film there are too many concurrent thoughts of the author which he has tried to fit into the idea that "they" have long since been among us. And he, like Chekhov's Kostya Treplev [in "The Seagull"], reflects about a world soul. And hence the quoted references to the developments in motion pictures in the 20th century, which can be traced in the photography of the film and the director's desire to embrace the unembraceable.

Shezad Dawood's film probably did not come as a shock to the public. Nor was it a revelation. But there were topics for long discussion and reflection about the kind of world we live in today and what reality in fact is: is it what we see, or is it something that is hidden from view? The author's leaning towards philosophical and esoteric speculation divided the whole auditorium - or, at least, those who stayed behind for the discussion, of whom there were quite a few.