Thomas Henning and Jonas Rusumalay Diaz | Timor-Leste, 2018

A surreal, fable-like meditation on life, death and spirituality in Timor-Leste, by filmmakers Thomas Henning and Jonas Rusumalay Diaz From its opening moments, as a man crawls to land from the ocean to be greeted by a lonely ghost, the new film from the Timor-Leste-based directors Diaz and Henning casts an evocative, haunting spell that appears to hover somewhere in the twilight dimension between life and death. The female ghost tells a tale of how she once haunted an unhappily married Timorese couple, while a mysterious, bedraggled wedding singer wanders the landscape with his acoustic guitar, and the stories dance around and fold into each other. Cinematographer Giovanni C Lorusso conjures a striking dreamscape of light and shadow, while the film’s use of multiple exposures and double-tracked dialogue suggests a world lingering on the fringes of reality. A startling work – doubly so given the rarity of films from Timor-Leste.