The Mountains

The act of making moving images has a highly personal and subtle purpose in this film, essentially functioning as a journey towards the mourning of a loved one. At the outset of The Mountains, the filmmaker Christian Einshøj is going through his father’s home video archive. This filming practice, which spans more than 30 years and started as a way of capturing a loved one’s last moments, somehow morphed after this loss into a continued, perhaps unconscious mourning process. How does one film when one is mourning? How does filming become intertwined with mourning? Alongside a highly mindful selection from this archival past presented in The Mountains, Christian Einshøj embarks on a filmed journey to attempt to draw closer to his siblings and parents and reconcile a family that has drifted apart over the years. This time, the camera might have an additional, complementary function: creating spaces for bonding via the tropes of fiction and fantasy, in the idiosyncratic manner of the cinematic device.

Dimitri de Preux