Nature

Legendary Armenian visual essayist Artavazd Peleshian’s first feature film in nearly 30 years is an epic return to his major theme: humanity in harmony and conflict with the natural world. Sublime and terrifying, the forces of Nature are captured in a relentless montage of found disaster videos—of capsizing icebergs, inky black dust clouds, ferocious winds, pitiless floodwaters. Rendered in stark black and white and subject to the distinctive mode of montage that Peleshian has developed over six decades, these images take on an uncanny mix of timelessness and immediacy, imparting an overwhelming experience of nature’s vast, destructive processes of regeneration, and of humanity’s precarious existence amid constantly unfolding catastrophe.

Screening with:
2 Pasolini
Andrei Ujică, 2021, France, 10m
Italian with English subtitles
World Premiere
Andrei Ujică’s 2 Pasolini follows the Italian auteur and his theological advisor, Don Andrea Carraro, on a trip through 1960s Palestine to scout locations for his 1964 biblical masterpiece The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Through candid archival footage and surprising juxtapositions, the film tracks both Pasolini’s journey and Christ’s—across the desert, to the shores of a raging sea, and beyond.

Explore Pelechian’s history with rare documents, historical photos, and contributions by figures from filmmakers Atom Egoyan, Andrei Ujică, and Pietro Marcello and critics such as Jean-Michel Frodon, Philippe Azoury, and Marguerite Vappereau, courtesy of The Fondation Cartier.