Bodysong

Colour, 35 mm
United Kingdom, 2002, 83 min
Section: Documentary Competition
Oficiální stránky: www.bodysong.com

Synopsis

Bodysong offers a panorama of the 100-year history of cinema crammed into eighty minutes; the result is a mosaic about birth, innocence, love, sex, violence, dreams and death. Film and news footage and images taken with a family video camera, suffused with a suggestive soundtrack by Radiohead´s Jonny Greenwood, go together to create dozens of mini-stories composed into a pictorial metaphor about the essential things in life. These are moments reflecting collective humanity from birth and initiation to fundamental experiences, whether supremely intimate or universal. Then on to adulthood, gradual aging and death, which ultimately leads to rebirth. A celebration of language as an instrument of communication, art, or the collective struggle for justice. Bodysong is conceived as a pressing encounter between the unique and the universal, ending in an expression of hope that the life-giving cycle will never be broken.

About the director

Simon Pummell (b. 1959) has made animated and feature films for Britain´s Channel 4. He contributed two short films to a project accompanying the album by the famous rock group Queen, Made in Heaven. He has over forty commercials to his name. Bodysong is his first feature-length film. He is currently planning several projects, one of which is a film adaptation of the science-fiction novel by William Gibson, Dogfight. The critics regard Pummell as an original filmmaker whose work combines classic film approaches with progressive, new technology. In 1998, in recognition of his work, the Locarno film festival organised a complete retrospective, screened in the section "Directors of the Present", the first time for a director of short films.