Parsi | Eduardo Williams, Mariano Blatt

After the amazing El auge del humano, screened in 2016 at Locarno Festival (Pardo d'oro, Cineasti del presente), Eduardo Williams comes back to Switzerland with a work in collaboration with Mariano Blatt.

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The image on the screen is constantly moving, moving with an anonymous subjective character that is not actually Eduardo Williams, but the many people that he met in Guinea Bissau. A perfectly decolonial gesture, which leaves room for improvisation, for surprises. By foot, by bike, by motorbike, by car, and finally on skates, the images wander into the unknown, whereas the voiceover grants a solid continuity through its repetitive poetic pattern. Mariano Blatt himself reads the open-ended on-going poem No es, introducing many impressions, situations, observations through a hypnotic “it seems”. The world that he brings into the film is more and more deeply anchored in Argentina, and this creates a productive distance with the African exploration. A decolonial gesture does not imply the loss of one’s own identity, but its exposition. The decided and fragile voice of the poem is like a skin surface that is completely exposed, in contact with unfamiliar temperatures and equatorial humidity. The film becomes the place for a meeting.

“It seems”: the poetic exercise of distance hints at the fictional distance of film illusion, and carries an intensification of perception. Distance and intensification find a new intriguing synthesis in the particular kind of image of Parsi. The urban landscape that we discover is wide open and bodily centered at the same time. This impression is the result of Williams’ using of a 360-degree GoPro camera, whose image has been successively reframed by Williams himself working within a VR apparatus. The deformation of the wide-angle lenses creates a feeling of acceleration towards the periphery of the image, amplifying the sensation of movement, and at the same time making us feel fully present, in the middle of the image, thereby breaking from the observational point of view. The impression of immersion and the vertigo of the unknown are both stressed. Distance and presence are the magnified coordinates of the feeling itself. The meeting and the feeling conflate.