16mm film, colour, optical sound, 6:36 min.
Soundtrack by Nicolas Clair
Produced with l’Abominable/Navire Argo Lab and ANIM lab – Cinemateca Portuguesa
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Film Project Award 2022 and by Fingal County Council
Man of Aral is an experimental film created from satellite images of the disappearing Sea of Aral in Central Asia, showing the gradual decrease in water levels and the drastic transformation of the landscape as a result of human activity.
A digital time lapse sequence was created from these images, transferred onto 16mm film, and chemically manipulated by hand with colour tints and toners, which affected the images visually and materially, creating a unique—both digital and analog, both mechanically and manually composed—hybrid visual object. The soundtrack by Nicolas Clair was inspired by the original score composed by John D. H. Greenwood for Man of Aran in 1934.
As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the 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.
Screenings:
Granada Film Festival, Spain, October 23rd 2024
Competición Aguaespejo
Hamilton Fish Pool, NYC Lower East Side, September 21st and 27th 2024
No Swimsuit Required, Water Works Program by Public Art Fund and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative co-curated by Tom Day and Gabriela López Dena
Watergate Theatre Kilkenny, September 25th 2024
Out of Focus Program by Juana Robles and Michael Higgins Out of Focus #3 – Drifting Scapes
La Rochelle International Film Festival, France, July 6th 2024
Programmed by Association Braquage
Avanti Navire Argo program at L’Ecran St Denis, France, June 7th
https://lecranstdenis.fr/FR/424
Indie Lisboa, National Competition, Portugal, May 29th/31st 2024 https://indielisboa.com/filme/man-of-aral/
62nd Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA, March 29th, 2024
Films in Competition 6: 35MM AND 16MM https://www.aafilmfest.org/62-schedule-page
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands,
Fine Grain Program, January 28, 29, February 1st 2024 https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/man-of-aral
The Sea of Aral (sea of islands in the original Mongolic and Turkic languages) was the fourth largest lake on earth until the beginning of its drainage in the 1960s due to agricultural irrigation projects in the Soviet Union, which caused water levels to retreat and the Aral Desert to form during the early 2010s. The disappearance of the water mass and exposure of the arid sea bed was not only a major ecological disaster with long lasting repercussions at a continental scale, but resonates with contemporary shifts in climate, access to water, and disruptions in ecosystems caused by human activity.
Production images, digital to 16mm b&w transfer kinescopage at L’Abominable Film Lab Paris, tinting and toning at A4 Sounds Darkroom Dublin, titles processing at Photo Museum Ireland, frame by frame tinting, Dublin (2022).
