LEVEL

genre: experimental documentary
length: approximately 80 minutes
status: in production

directors: Anna Berkhof & Carlos Mora Fuentes
soundtrack: Red Brut
voice over texts: Marie Claus, Anna Berkhof & Carlos Mora Fuentes
producer: Carlos Mora Fuentes
executive producers: Sofia Lena Monardo & Anna Berkhof

production country: Spain
filmed in: The Netherlands, Spain
languages: English, Dutch, Spanish
supported by: ICAA, Gobierno de Cantabria
selected for: DCP04 FIlmoteca Cantabria (winner), Residencias Walden, Calmadocs (Majordocs)
invited to: Abycine Lanza, San Sebastian Film Festival

SYNOPSIS

Level is about landscapes. Landscapes that are irrevocably changing due to climate change.
We have memories of landscapes that don’t exist anymore. We miss them.
The different layers of the film are grounded by a universal narrative: the loss of a loved one leads to a period of introspection, but after a while there is more space for new things. Then a child is born and a new life begins.

Level is split into two parts: Usquert and Miera, corresponding to the two places where we lived over the last few years. One landscape in the north of the Netherlands: flat, empty and close to the sea dike. The other in the North of Spain, mountainous, isolated and rough. Two directors (Anna is Dutch, Carlos Spanish), two landscapes, two vital moments. Level is a story of opposites: life and death, new and old, Spanish and Dutch, tough and malleable. But Level is also a story of continuations: life goes on. From grief to new discoveries, to starting a family.

In Usquert Anna is grieving the death of her father, finding refuge in the wild garden surrounding the house. We document the open landscape around this little haven. The big fields, dikes, land outside the dikes. Anna’s father used to meticulously document the nature in this region, and now Anna follows in his footsteps. For Carlos this landscape below sea level is alien and alarming. Where Anna is used to it, he feels the ominous threat of the sea lying just behind the dike.

In Miera we welcome Leo, our son. We are renovating an old house with a lot of history and are building a new life, which is hard work, both physically and mentally. Hard work is something that the people in this valley are used to, and their faces and bodies carry the marks of the landscape with them. The arrival in a landscape that is so ancient while bringing a new life into the world brings to the surface questions about time, human interference and what the future might hold.

All of this results in a film that shows small human life in the context of big geological timescales.

DIRECTORS

/ Carlos Mora Fuentes

Carlos (Santander, 1979) studied film direction in Madrid after a career in Environmental Engineering. He premiered his first film in October 2020 (co-directed): the documentary Tierra de Leche y Miel: a collective portrait that reflects on the consequences that human displacement caused by the war has had on different human groups. It premiered at Seminci, where it won the award for best Spanish documentary 2020. Since then he has directed several shorts and installation pieces.

Carlos’ website

/ Anna Berkhof

Anna (Oldehove, 1987) is an artist, photographer, gardener and historian specialised in landscape. She worked as an editor, writer and curator at different art collectives and platforms. In her work she shows how we interact with the natural world: sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. Level is her first film project.

Anna’s website

VOICE OVER


/ Marie Claus

Marie Claus debuted in 2005 with the poetry collection ‘Bonzai!’, After which she wrote a play entitled ‘Kogels zijn woorden / Woorden zijn kogels’ (2006) and a second collection of poems, ‘Dat was dat’ ( 2008). In 2011, she concluded two years as the official poet for the city of Groningen with Wissen, a commissioned collection of city poems. In 2016 she published “Begrafenis van de mannen”. In 2023 she completed the collection of poems ‘Hier huizen draken’ and she’s working on a novel to be published in 2024. Marie has ample experience performing her work on stage and in collaboration with musicians.

——

SOUNDTRACK

For the soundtrack we work with Red Brut. She will record the sounds of the landscapes and combine them with sounds she creates at those locations, using the things she encounters there. In this way she will create a unified soundtrack composed of two very distinct places with their own sounds.


/ Red Brut

Marijn Verbiesen / Red Brut is an experimental sound artist who since 2018 has played at various festivals and venues in the European underground music scene, and has released several albums. Field recording and DIY (do it your- self) are at the core of her work.

BACKGROUND

For the form of Level we are inspired by Robert Smithson’s interpretation of entropy. In her essay Broken Circle and Spiral Hill: having entropy the Dutch way Anja Novak explains how Smithson uses the term:

“Notions of disorder, decay, loss of boundaries, loss of self and even death are inseparably connected to Smithson’s conception of entropy. Only by facing and accepting the possibility of entropic disintegration can the artist perceive an impending new order.” ... “In a world that seems to be falling apart as the old structures it relied upon crumble, we need to learn how to let new structures evolve from the entropic situations that we have co-created.”

In Level you find entropy in the landscapes, and in the lives of the protagonists.
 What interests us most about the concept is the idea that when something changes, or you take a decision, it will never be like it was before that moment. You cannot bring back someone from the dead, you cannot restore a landscape to its original form, you cannot move back home and expect everything be the same as it was before. And more importantly, maybe you shouldn’t want to. We want both the form and content of Level to show disintegration to a point where the protagonists are now: a moment when we feel the old world crumbling around us, and we are in a place where there are options, opportunities and unlikely sources of new ideas. We are thinking about building a future. A future for ourselves and our son. But also a future for the Miera Valley, which is depopulating quickly. We keep Smithson’s approach to dealing with anthropogenic landscapes close to heart in our real life, as in the creation of this film.

SHAPE(SHIFTER)

But Level is more than just a film: it is a small-scale flexible project that can be adapted to different environments. It can be screened in a cinema, during a music festival, at an exhibition, etc. The parts form a whole, and the whole can be dismantled into parts to disseminate the work in different ways: as a publication of the texts written by Marie Claus , as an album by Red Brut, as a musical performance accompanied by fragments of the film, or as an installation in a gallery or museum.

MORE INFO

The full dossier and access to a teaser are available by sending an email to carlosmora823@gmail.com or a whatsapp to +34689974245.