A few months ago, I blogged about my friend Ben’s new film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. Tonight, this same film is being shown at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center as part of New Directors/New Films.
Born out of a genuine concern for our perilous present, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a post-existentialist attempt to invoke utopia in the now–a meditation on how we may move forward at a time when “things are moving to the dystopic.” How might film itself offer us a way out of the darkness?
A SPELL follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black metal band in Norway. Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A SPELL is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present…an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
