Lessons in the dark

The opening programme of Lessons of Darkness will take place almost simultaneously at two venues: at Kinodvor, with the films God Is Shy and Lessons of Darkness, and at the Slovenian Cinematheque, where, alongside God Is Shy, the programme will also feature Because the Internet 1, Because the Internet 2, Galactic Supermarket Presents Cosmic Rainbows and Portrait Werner Herzog.

Both opening programmes offer a look into the unknown – not so much as a search for answers, but rather as an attempt to see the familiar world from the other side, if only for a moment. This is most literally embodied by Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, filmed amid the burning oil fields of Kuwait after the Gulf War. Herzog almost entirely sets aside the political and geographical context and films the real humanitarian and ecological catastrophe as if it were an expedition to an unknown planet. The earth, covered in oil, smoke and fire, becomes both a document of a historical moment and an eerie sci-fi landscape. Made in 1992, the film seems no less apocalyptic today – quite the opposite. Its peculiar power lies precisely in its departure from explanation: it alienates the familiar just enough for us to see it anew and recognise, within the otherworldly images, something eerily familiar, something that seems to be returning today and could return at any moment in an even more cataclysmic form. This look into the unknown continues with the current festival hit God Is Shy by Jocelyn Charles, a psychedelic animated horror film in which an innocent game played by two fellow passengers on a train – the drawing of their greatest fears – begins to transform into something far darker and more unpredictable with the arrival of a mysterious female passenger. The film moves freely between humour, fantasy and horror, transforming fear into a space of imagination where the usual rules momentarily cease to apply.