Director: Andreas Aicka Thomsen
Writer: Andreas Aicka Thomsen
Cast: Yasemin Orhan, Andrea Ostenfeldt, Clea Filippa
Running time: 11mins
We live in a decaying world of contradictions, where long-standing ideological fallacies are routinely shown up as such. Hegemonic economic thought across Europe and North America has led to most people living there to be raised with certain expectations; their individual autonomy is enshrined, and this will provide a space for everyone to follow their dreams as a wide-eyed believer. Should they do that adequately, then the security of a happy, healthy life awaits.
Countless generations have, of course, learned that this is not the case. However beautifully etched onto ancient paper liberal rights might be, however floral the language, they count for nothing if the world’s leaders decide against enforcing them. However powerfully political and economic elites might speak on the rights of a person to do what they love, it always comes with the caveat that if that doesn’t align with the interests of the corporate world, you may be left to starve.
But what has increasingly set latter generations apart from those before, when they learn this lesson, is that those born since the mid-70s have been born into a world increasingly bereft of alternatives. Movements to usher in different ways of living have either been crushed or co-opted by the world’s rich and powerful. Many of us are left knowing things aren’t good, in this case, but we are failed by the language we have learned as normal and natural; bereft of a lexicon that could help us make sense of and challenge our present conditions.
In this state of limbo, Anemoia seems to have become part of the prevailing zeitgeist. Andreas Aicka Thomsen’s film of the same name opens with a title card which explains the neologism as a sense of longing for something intangible; a “nostalgia for a time or place one has never known”. Thinking about it, there are many forms of the concept at play around the world, socially, economically and politically. Post-Trump American politics has been blighted by blinkered handwringing from some quarters that a country built on slavery and genocide should find a way to return to its previous state of ‘tolerance’. Similarly, some rose-tinted accounts of the pre-Brexit life in the UK hark back to a time of free movement – tactfully dancing around the caveat that that right has never been extended to the refugees perishing on the coasts of the continent.
In the case of this stunning experimental short, it is entirely open to interpretation exactly what kind of anemoia the cast may be experiencing. Thomsen’s camera follows Ninevah (Yasemin Orhan), Agate (Andrea Ostenfeldt) and Iya (Clea Filippa), as the three women seem to dip in and out of each other’s reality. Despite being filmed separately in locations of breath-taking geographical beauty in Denmark, Lithuania and Norway, at various points, each of the time-lines seems close enough to reach out and touch the other – to impact, support and care for two other parallel lives. As the sequence progresses, the highs of these interactions turn to isolated lows, with each character gradually drifting further from the other’s sphere of influence.
Most obviously, this could be simply alluding to the way in which human relationships manifest. Sometimes people become near and dear to each other for a brief time, before once again diverging, and being left with half-remembered feelings and torturous glimpses of what they thought they had – whether or not it was really there. That is not only a feature of romantic relationships, it can also be attached to a fading friendship, or an absent family member.
Without definitive confirmation, the tender and trusting way in which the three women correspond throughout the piece might lead you to believe that this is a romantic relationship. In that case, the anemoia at play here could also pertain to several other levels of social alienation people are plagued by at present. Those include a sad longing for a time when it was apparently easy for loving people to build a life together – conventionally that might include owning a house and raising children – and which seems a painful and futile endeavour with wages stagnating against inflation, and the threats of nuclear Armageddon or a climate apocalypse hanging over our heads. This again harks back to a state of nature that never existed – at least not universally. My parents had no hope of affording a house in Thatcher’s Britain, and they were also contending with the constant threat of nuclear war. But amid the furious protests of the decade, they weren’t marooned in the way that the characters of Anemoia seem to feel – who are left instead to stew in a mystical reminiscence of a past that did not exist.
As the prospective relationship of Anemoia is also not hetero-normative, there is an additional possibility that there is also nostalgia that is distinct to the LGBT+ community. Coming out of a period where some might have dared to venture the fight was ‘won’, governments around the world are rowing back on historic protections for the community. In this context, there might be a temptation to reminisce about the brief window where ‘good’ governments prioritised the progress of LGBT+ rights – the assumption being that they did so out of a sense of what was right, rather than because they were under mounting pressure from campaigns that could have made their ability to govern untenable. In the presence of a defanged Pride movement, which has largely been coopted by corporate interests and distanced from other active struggles, legislators and the judiciary (particularly but not exclusively in America) clearly feel comfortable in rolling back those changes – or lending uncritical support to other countries which are doing so – not because an old order has been lost, but because they can afford to behave in the way they have always wanted to.
In the end, the sombre mood of isolation at the close of Anemoia might encapsulate feelings of so many aspects of society that have unknowingly been atomised over the course of several decades. For all the intricate and polished ways we are now told we can interact, those interactions may never have meant less – may never have operated on a scale in which there was so little ideological possibility or imagination. We are able to acknowledge problems, but until very recently the only way to address it was to beg the prevailing political consensus for a semi-skimmed rather than full-fat nightmare. The only escape in that isolated space might seem to be into illusory fictions of a misremembered past – encapsulated by the distant figures dancing in spectacular landscapes which close out Anemoia.
Admittedly a lot of this review has been the rambling summations of what the film could be about, rather than what it does on a technical level. I would always argue that’s the sign of an experimental film that has done its job. But let’s be clear before I close, that everything Thomsen has done here is perfectly geared toward the beautiful duality of avant-garde cinema.
The cinematography here is peerless, it’s not just someone playing with some very expensive toys, but using them to build a visual prose. As in his previous effort of Miasma, Thomsen’s camera contrasts sharp, deeply personal imagery against towering and imperious scenery; and giving us licence to think about distinctly individual stories, in a bigger, more ominous context. The dreamlike soundtrack – reminiscent of Disco Elysium, which also plays with themes of memory and personal trauma against a larger, darker backdrop – blends seamlessly with the echoing grandeur of nature. And each of the stars, Ostenfeldt, Filippa and Orhan, do wonderful jobs of inviting us to believe we are part of their world; before leaving us keyed into their personal devastation, as they gradually withdraw.
The fact the small team pulled together so well also presents a lovely nugget of hope in all this talk of retreats into individual despair – because as more and more people are realising, it reminds us that even though our instinctive response to problems has become individualised anemoia, collective actions can still provide us an important means of affecting debate, consciousness and the world around us.