Sol Negro

Taking the recent partial solar eclipse as its ostensible topic, Fazendiero’s film is a meditation on the role that light plays in shaping consciousness. To this end, we hear Delphine Seyrig reading a poem by Henri Michaux about a land where sunlight is a precious commodity. Fazendiero opens the film with tinted images – mountains, volcanoes, waterfalls – that resemble the ethnographic recordings of early explorers. In context, this material seems to suggest that, at one time, everything before the camera seemed out of reach, impossible to see. Now, not even the sun is off limits to our eyes. (Viennale)