Jorge Honik

The life story of an artist. The fantasy of a poetic burial accompanied by friends of cinema.

Based on the Jorge Luis Borges story of the same name, the film, by means of a whirlwind of elusive images, relates the story’s protagonist’s long journey in search of the secret City of the Immortals. Nightmarish animation sequences are interspersed with lush naturalistic photography.

A collage of images filmed mostly in Maghreb and Patagonia. Frenetic rhythms mix with stationary shots: a forest admidst fog, daybreak over a hill, a furious journey along a road on the Algerian coast, a glacier, a desert.

A nervous, careless recording of a trip through India and Nepal at the beginning of the 1970s. Fleeting impressions of faces, landscapes, temples, people and things. Images that, having been captured in a ephemeral medium, proceed to fade away (although without aging), alongside the river of time.

A walk in a wheat farmland in the a village. While moving between the tall sheaves, the walker’s restless eye surveys the fields, the cattle, and settles on the faces of the residents of the small town. Brief animation exercises repeat, and the sketch the figure of a contemplative walker.

Images of the Church of the Sagrada Familia by Antoni Gaudí confronted with brief flashes of housing projects and industrial areas. The furious display of a effervescent imagination is opposed to a grey functionality.

A ‘divertimento’ performed in an abandoned premises of an Algerian tourist center, uninhabited in winter.

Clouds, mostly filmed frame by frame on the outskirts of Quarzazate, Tabount, Morocco.

A movie filmed almost entirely in the interior of a house on the outskirts of S.C. de Bariloche, on the shores of Nahuel Huapi Lake, over the course of one full winter and the beginning of a spring. The camera, through frame-by-frame tracking and panning shots, goes along revealing furniture, corners, objects and books, using rails in the first instance and a calibrated disk mounted on a tripod in the second. The house vibrates with its own life, revealing almost ghostlike traces and vestiges while the human presence is barely suggested. These shots alternate with others of the landscape: a lake, snow, bushes rattled by the wind, the passing of the seasons, external signs that accentuate the solitude of the interior spaces.

Honik's first film in nearly forty years explores the myriad possibilities of digital video by creating an analogy with the four natural elements. The fifth element projects human essence as waste, with a dumping ground serving as metaphor for a medium capable of endless production of images.

Honik's first film in nearly forty years explores the myriad possibilities of digital video by creating an analogy with the four natural elements. The fifth element projects human essence as waste, with a dumping ground serving as metaphor for a medium capable of endless production of images.