Reflective Encounters

“A few minutes into Davor Sanvincenti’s Places We’ll Breathe a long strip of film is exhumed from the ground, mere seconds before being abruptly projected against an aggressive score of repeated drone-y sounds. Soil, dirt, and organic matter are all beautifully exposed, opening pathways to crawl into the interstices of image and sound, organic and inorganic, human and animal.

Text on screen accompanies the entire film, weaving a slippery narrative comprised of recollections of past encounters, meditations on collaborative survival and class struggle, as well as literary quotes by Chris Marker, R. M. Rilke, and Confucius among others. Sanvincenti’s ecological sensibility also permeates Places We’ll Breathe. A shot of a tree surrounded by a drystone wall prompts an enthusiastic comment on how an unnamed rural community cherished and protected that single tree for generations. Elsewhere in the film, plants and humans are compared in that the condition for their survival lies in living per their respective nature.

The film’s topography remains ultimately ambiguous, as if to suggest that the colonialist power dynamics critically addressed in the written commentary are not a localised problem, but rather endemic to the world over.”

— Ren Scateni