Zoraine's Forest is a silent, experimental film that studies 'plant life' through printlike imagery and painterly textures. The film follows no particular narrative, although its images are sequenced from daylight to nightlight. It was filmed entirely during the day. Its footage was shot in high exposure, i.e, with a high ISO and low aperture in lowlight and vice-versa in brighter periods. This, in addition to shooting in LOG, allowed for greater flexibility in the editing process. It gave me a wide scale within which I could manifest an image to its deepest white, linen grey or a rich black essence.
The idea of studying botany through printlike images emerged after reflecting on my earlier works. I had been influenced by the textures of 16mm and 8mm celluloid and had tried to incorporate them in my films, as is a norm in contemporary film culture. This time, my relentless intention to break the digital form made me use the medium wrongly in order to discover a new language. I thought about how I could isolate a subject in natural light whilst capturing it in a scattered, impressionistic manner. I was especially influenced by film negatives and screen-prints.
Unlike a few of my previous films like eyes of a pink sun, Still Life, Scopium, Seven Stones and Thani, the concept of 'vintage' wasn't considered in the process of making Zoraine's Forest. A few techniques like monochrome, grainy footage, inverted monochrome and grayscales were used again to create painterly textures, rather than to emote or emulate film noir.
Filming in high exposure demanded a greater sensibility towards framing. A high density of elements inside a frame resulted in convoluted abstractions. Each shot aimed at discovering a unique kind of monochrome. The film's soft, grainy texture was used as a means to control its excessive exposure and overwhelming elements. It helped me balance Zoraine's Forest into a world that was realistic and less fantastical. This was enhanced with the use of a simple soundscape. The significant shift in its ambience from the first half to the second half of the film helped create a vivid passage of time
The Film
Zoraine's Forest / silent / experimental / b/w / 5 mins 47 seconds
Zoraine's Forest was made for the DELETE TV All Eyes In Festival 2024 in London. The experimental nature of the festival motivated me to manipulate my surroundings and gather a surreal perception of the world. It helped me condense its elements in a precise fashion, avoiding unnecessary use of imagery, sound and duration. Rather, the film focused on a steady series of images and the destruction of time, such that the viewers' experience is no longer limited to the measurements of the real world, but that of the film's world.
The film is part of my continued effort towards studying plant and animal life and building the viewers' sensitivity towards nature through provocative imagery. Though Zoraine's Forest was shot in the city, and parts of that is visible in the film, its constructed reality aims at portraying nature as though it belongs to a character's perception. The idea of 'forest' in the film's title doesn't imply a real forest, rather a person's subjective world of flora. It adds to the myriad filmic methods of illustration, besides documentary, fiction and memoirs.
