As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the Aral Sea landscape and of the film material itself as competing human and geological timelines through distant views of a rapidly yet almost invisibly changing territory, a key event of unprecedented scale.
Man of Aral reveals the profuse organicity of a sea disappearing into an exploratory experimental landscape. The film is made from satellite images of the Aral Sea – the sea of islands – in central Asia, from a digital time-lapse sequence, transferred to 16mm film. The process of manipulating the images chemically by hand develops a vibrant and sonorous painting, resulting from the contamination of the materials. The image metamorphoses under digital and analog action, transmuting itself into a unique imagery and sound body. Nicolas Clair’s soundtrack was inspired by John D. H. Greenwood, who originally composed it for Flaherthy’s 1934 film “Man of Aran”. The human hand destroying the landscape enters into dialog and inspires other hands to compose an experimental and condensed replica of an ecological catastrophe. – Carlota Gonçalves
