Director: Sabina Pieroni
Running time: 3mins
Film festivals cost a lot of money – and so they often struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees often posing as the only dependable source of revenue that many festivals have access to, that can make granting waivers difficult.
Stories told by artists working on a shoe-string budget, or who are hit by censorship, or subjected to international sanctions, still need a platform, though. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a fifth season.
Over the current run of matinees, IFL is showcasing work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free and easy communication of their artistic or political visions.
The penultimate film in our free-to-view programme is by Greek filmmaker Sabina Pieroni. Named after the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne is an experimental short film centring on a dream sequence which blurs the boundaries between lived experiences and fiction.
The film sees a series of flickering images layered over each other, while a woman sleeps. At the same time, what appears to be the voice of a long-forgotten deity echoes through her strange, amorphous dreamscape, weaving hallucinations and memories into one. The sound-design deserves particular praise, as the leading monologue overlaps with hushed whispers, strange synthetic tones and gentle music – to achieve an eerie effect in which it almost feels as though some strange force is trying to plant not-necessarily-benign thoughts into our waking conscious.
This ambiguity of a mission is perhaps the biggest strength of Pieroni’s film. As her one-woman show continues to explore the concept of identity and the cycle of life through archetypal images and symbols emerging from memory and the subconscious, it is never clear whether or not the fate apparently awaiting the sleeping figure is a good or bad thing. Not every statement carried in the eternal hum of messaging that surrounds us in the era of instant communication is evil – but the wider current of that endless sluice of words, sounds and images may well be carrying us in a more sinister direction. At the same time, it is becoming harder and harder to extract our ‘real’ lives from the constructed ones we constantly find ourselves interacting with.
It is a set of circumstances worth pondering as Mnemosyne promises this character a wonderful life ahead, if only she commits to some unknown tasks in the near-future. And whether or not the director overtly meant for this, one of the best things about experimental film is that it builds a space where this kind of introspection can be allowed to flourish, however the viewer needs it to.
As always with Saturday Matinees, the film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 3rd of July, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. You can give it your own score out of five there! As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE24 to access the film.