Harbour

During the shoot for Flying Over the Blue Field, Stonys and his team stayed in the Brištonas sanatorium. Here, fascinated, he filmed the bodies plunged into baths of mud, water or steam in this private and shared “port” in which men and women rid themselves of their tired cocoons. Shot with Ukrainian celluloid whose state can vary with time (turning either brown or white), Harbour incorporates degradation and, eventually, disappearance into its very medium. The static shots are composed like paintings, bordering on photography. The soundtrack has lyrical chants ring out from time to time. Everything, from the framing through to the rhythm of the editing, contributes to transfiguring the sanatorium, depicting it as a place in which strange liturgies take place. In ten short minutes, the filmmaker successfully captures, with strength and depth, a ritual stasis that the protagonists, closer to death than to life, observe as a renewed promise of rebirth.
Emmanuel Chicon