It turns out the idiom ‘swan song’ derives from a combination of false projections. A swan is neither silent nor does it sing right before its death. In fact, because of their extraordinary wingspans (among the largest of any flying species), they not only make sound from their beaks but also as they take flight. Even the so-called mute swan (Cygnus olor) isn’t mute. It is named so only because it’s quieter than other swans. Native to Eurasia, swans are an ancient species that have long captured the Western imagination: Swan Lake, Jan Asselijn’s Threatened Swan… And, of course, Aristotle’s incorrect claim that swans sing their first and final song before dying — a metaphor he used to describe the final work an artist makes as their greatest. It’s far more likely, however, that the ‘song’ Aristotle observed was a warning song to alert other swans to the presence of a predator. An act of generosity and selflessness.
The three films in this program: my own, Morgenkreis, bookended by two magnificent tours de force that I was fortunate enough to see in festivals this year: Merrimundi by Niles Atallah (at the 30th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur) and Slet 1988 by Marta Popivoda (at the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival). These filmic encounters occurred during the slow diminuendo of a world I had decided as dead. They followed a tumultuous and crushing period in which vast swaths of the cultural sector — including intimate, long-standing connections — proved unwilling to defend (or even tolerate) Palestinian resistance in the face of ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide. Continuing to make work in such conditions is only possible because others continue to make work. These films reminded me that cinema is not made for places but for people; that rights belong to humans, not states; and that in a world that is pummelling towards meaninglessness, there are still those who produce beautiful, structurally powerful visual poetry.
What binds Slet 1988 to Morgenkreis is the way the dying world frames our intimate spaces. In Slet 1988, a dancer’s fragile body contains the strength of surviving past a brutal collapse, set against the socialist modernist architecture of former Yugoslavia. That same architecture seeps into the opening travelling shot of Morgenkreis. Both sites render this architecture obsolete — in contrast to the bodies that survive in and beyond their ideological significance. Similarly — though plunging us into a world of its own making with a decaying puppet as a symbol of regeneration and hope — the singing in Merrimundi treats language as obsolete. Here we find a tool to carry us into the next world and the one after, with both lamentation and joy at leaving this one behind. As far as I’m concerned, these are our swan songs. (Basma al-Sharif)
In the presence of Marta Popivoda
Curated by Basma al-Sharif
In Slet 1988, the dancer Sonja Vukićević moves through the utopian architecture of socialist modernism — her body is an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a teenage girl’s 1988 diary. They expose the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism — all while a new national collective body creeps in, soon to shape the future of the country.
Drifting through the streets of former East Berlin neighborhoods, Morning Circle traces the unsteady affective terrain of isolation and displacement, assimilation and oppression. In Basma al-Sharif’s film, the bureaucratic condescension and violence of a residency interview sits alongside domestic scenes featuring a father and his young son. The film uncovers the loss and thrumming tensions of exilic life under Western Europe’s smooth grey surfaces. (NYFF)
A twisted utopia unfolds as singing cherubs melt to the sound of decay. Crafted by a sentient machine from the future, it unveils its own version of paradise.
In an age dulled by algorithmic sameness, Merrimundi embraces chaos as resistance. It speaks through disorder, imagining humanity’s wild transformation. It is not escape but insurgent imagination. This film is a flare into the unknown, defending the messy, poetic right to dream beyond conformity.
