Screening: IN BETWEEN THERE WERE CITIES
*A film about leaving the mountains & the sea
Written, directed & filmed by: Sameer Farooq & Ursula Engel
Documentary-video essay/25 minutes/In English
Filmed on location in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada
(film sysnopsis below)
Monday, March 20
9:00pm
Innis Town Hall // 2 Sussex Ave.
(Inside Innis College building on the University of Toronto's downtown campus, corner of St. George Street just south of Bloor Street. METRO: St. George Station)
Free.
Thank you, Innis Town Hall, for making this screening possible.
Questions?: [email protected]
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Synopsis: IN BETWEEN THERE WERE CITIES (2005)
I asked him: ?Don?t you experience the sea as a border??
?No.? he said, ?If I stand at the beach with my back toward the land, I know that everything of use happens behind my back. But the open sea? there is much more out there.?
Returning to the city, the nameless hero of the film recalls his journey from Hoek van Holland on the Dutch coast to Poschiavo in the south mountains of Switzerland. His travel was an attempt to come to terms with the great symbols of nature ? the mountains and the sea. Yet, his ideas of nature never seemed to match up with the reality of the sites he encountered.
In a micro sense, this fictional essay is about the surrealistic qualities of the Dutch coast and the remoteness of Swiss mountain valleys, ?where all of the trees were dead and all of the houses were for sale?. Yet, in the larger sense, the film is a meditative journey addressing human interaction with nature.
Numerous travels along the Dutch coast and through the Swiss mountains yielded images which could only be revealed through a continual dedication to specific locations. The narration, written by the directors, ties together the disparate images and highlights their curiosity about the filmic image of the mountains and of the sea, as imagined from the city.
Through carefully framed images and a lingering narrative line, 'In Between There Were Cities' gives a quiet and considered view on our relationship to landscape and the spiritual tremblings of nature in its broadest sense.
--
SAMEER FAROOQ is a filmmaker and graphic designer trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie of art in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and at McGill University in Montreal. Sameer currently lives and works in Toronto. URSULA ENGEL was born in Basel, Switzerland, and also completed a degree from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie of art. Ursula currently lives between Basel and Amsterdam. Currently the team is working on a third film, to be filmed in Beijing, China & Brussels, Belgium, in the fall of 2006.
--