Entropy + Sunspot + The Cloud People
Inuk Jørgensen, David Blandy, Iulian Furtuna, Iulian Furtuna & Marius Lena / Greenland, United Kingdom, France & Barbados / 72 min
Three short and fascinating films about science and celestial bodies.
Entropy
Inuk Jørgensen / Greenland / 2023 / 10 min
Scenic imagery merges with indigenous mythology in a Greenlandic short film about a changing land.
The vast Greenlandic ice sheet has been created over thousands of years, with snowfall after snowfall moulding the land the Inuit call home. As the ice cap is melting, the water will never be able to form this type of ice again. In Greenlandic filmmaker Inuk Jørgensen’s scenic short film ‘Entropy’, the ice cap becomes a symbol of the director’s own people, who have always lived in a close and sacred connection with the nature around them – a connection that is threatened as the ice melts beneath their feet. Climate change is the omnipresent threat in a film that celebrates Greenlandic mythologies and myths as much as it laments the nature we are all losing.
Sunspot
David Blandy / United Kingdom / 2023 / International Premiere / 13 min
A poetic archive film about light, time, forest fires and quantum physics.
On the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, two scientists sat on opposite sides of the world observing sunspots. One in Tokyo, the other in California. The image of the two observatories linked by historical coincidence is the starting point for David Blandy’s poetic archive film about light, time, forest fires and quantum physics. Sunspots were important astronomical phenomena during the war because they could interfere with army radio signals, so the observatories were sharply focussed on the light in the sky. At the same time, an equally powerful light was switched on here on Earth, and the world has never been the same since.
The Cloud People
Iulian Furtuna, Iulian Furtuna & Marius Lena / France & Barbados / 2024 / World Premiere / 49 min
With humour, poetry and an infectious love of science, they look to the white population of the sky for answers to climate change, life's big questions and why some clouds actually stand still.
In Barbados in the Caribbean, they are feeling the effects of climate change harder than the rest of us. Brutal storms have increased over the past several years, making the island a living hell for its residents. But on the other hand, the island has become a paradise for the many climate scientists who flock there to study the complex weather systems and observe the clouds in the sky. The scientists’ scientific joy is contagious, for example, when they finally succeed in measuring the depth of a cloud with Bob Marley on the loudspeaker. Clouds are the visible part of a much larger system that we have difficulty understanding and which has fallen fundamentally out of balance. With an evocative and poetic voice-over, the clouds give rise to larger existential questions about what science can tell us about living on earth and what role the clouds will actually play in the climate crisis. Spliced together with poetry, history and science, ‘The Cloud People’ is a film that will make you look up and change the way you look at the sky and its inhabitants.