Super Natural deals with concepts of connection and touch through sensory stimuli. Filmed in Funchal, Portugal's Madeira archipelago, it features performers, with and without disabilities, as well as the real and imagined island’s inhabitants: crabs, rocks, dragon fruits and mermaids.
The film opens onto total darkness. We are made privy to a conversation between two non-human beings, whose voices are rendered via subtitles. Albeit cryptic, their exchanges evoke a mindful meditation. Slowly, an expanse of blue light covers the previously black screen. As colours shift, transiting through different strata of sunlight, the voices intimate that all is “a question of flow”.
These first minutes are symbolic of the broader editing, which blends images almost seamlessly. Super 8 mm, pixelated security camera footage and digital renders coalesce, conveying the idea that all images, or beings, are commensurate. All bodies in equilibrium. The narrators’ tender conversation echoes the camera’s soft gaze. Even as it films performers asleep, it is never voyeuristic. Its choreography favours slow-transitions and non-linear trajectories. Like bodies, it drifts, floating on plastic orange-rinds or crocodile buoys.
Originally planned for the theatre, the film invites viewers to reconsider what participation and collective experiences can mean. It acts as a meditation on extrasensory perception and questions the way gender and ableism define our interactions.
Programme
- Introduction by the artist
- Super Natural 2022, 4K colour video, sound, 85 min, Portuguese with English subtitles
- Conversation with the artist
Jorge Jácome, Super Natural 2022, video still. Courtesy the artist and Portugal Film, Lisboa
Jorge Jácome, Super Natural 2022, video still. Courtesy the artist and Portugal Film, Lisboa
Jorge Jácome, Super Natural 2022, video still. Courtesy the artist and Portugal Film, Lisboa
Jorge Jácome (b. 1988, Portugal) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Lisbon. His work is based on an intuitive and sensorial process resulting in films made of narrative drifts, unexpected relationships and unusual encounters. His short films have been shown at film festivals all around the world including in Austria, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Slovenia, Poland, and Israel, and in retrospectives at the Palais de Tokyo and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, France, and at CalArts - California Institute of the Arts and the Georgetown University in the United States.
Performers: Dançando com a Diferença and Teatro Praga companies
Director of Photography: Marta Simões
Sound: Antonio Porém Pires
Score: Violet and Raw Forest
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