Mater Inerta

Spain, 2022, 24'

FREE ENTRY

In a rural area of Cataluña, Teresa and her dog Luna live in a landscape where the human presence has been incessantly excavating the earth. Quarries, woods, and farms testify to a laborious and apparently unavoidable expansion of control over nature. Industrial machines seem to have a life of their own, assisted by tiny human figures, cogs in a larger, almost metaphysical mechanism. However, the rural landscape conceals an underground tension, a subtle restlessness amplified by the film’s sound design, a sign of the unresolved relationship of nature and manufacture. Such tension is unexpectedly embodied, off-screen, in the dog Luna, i.e., the rebellion of the irrational against control; a sudden, bestial burst of violence is at once the outcome and acceleration of the crisis of meaning that pervades the land. Faced with the precipitation of events, Teresa is bewildered, lost in a ghostly limbo, in search of an impossible solution to issues that overcome her.