Distant lights draw the city. Shining ships arrive with sleeping people and the night turns liquid. The stars’ sower wakes them up and they travel through the city, talking about this and that, while saying goodbye to everything.
English Title The Sower of Stars Year of production 2022 Length 25min Country Spain Shooting Format HD Aspect Ratio 16:9 Dialogue Japanese Director Lois Patiño Writer Lois Patiño Cinematographer Lois Patiño Editor Lois Patiño Sound Designer Xabier Erkizia Voices Yumiko Teramoto. Testuro Mareda Festival selections Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival 2022 Germany - World Premiere
Director's Statement Tokyo at night is dazzling, a fantasy of hypnotizing lights. Observed with distance and stillness, if you let yourself be carried away by them, you can find a meditative atmosphere there. The first thing I tried to capture was this peaceful feeling, hidden within the vertigo of a megalopolis like Tokyo.
I worked on the image with two plastic references that emerged very quickly: Zen landscape painting -from where I could underline the idea of emptiness and silence- and the cyberpunk aesthetics of films like Blade Runner -to build futuristic neon architectures by superimposing planes-.
From this atmosphere I began to think the story. I am always interested in the limbo space between life and death, imaginary and real, where the borders between both blur to make the spectral and dreamlike emerge. I wanted the story to pass through this ideas, giving shape to it from a dialogue of disembodied voices. Voices that cross the city-limbo while being both outside and inside the image, as a kind of depersonalization.
I constructed the dialogues from a certain poetic crypticism inspired by the koan -mystical teachings of Zen Buddhism-. And they gradually settled down, from readings, in a script more of an editor than a writer, like a book of aphorisms that keeps little jewels. Very condensed thoughts related mainly to contemplation, because this was the biggest challenge for me here: to find a balance between narration and contemplation, between text and image, ensuring that they enhance each other, despite each one demands a different attention from us: one more sensitive, the other more rational.
