Human condition(s) (Nadin Mai)

"Slow films focus on the unseen, the invisible, stories from the margins of our societies. They tell stories that happen daily around the world, events that, perhaps, happen to our next-door neiighbour. Yet these stories remain silent because they are stories that are ordinary and therefore removed from view."

[..]

"If the films I'm writing about in this book have all been made between 1994 and 2018, it is not a coincidence. When I look at this time period, the films have all been made throughout my tumultuous childhood full of conflicts and war on television, my adolescence which was marked by 9/11 and the subsequent fracturing of the world into 'us' and 'them', and whose repercussions we can still feel today."

[..]

"Human Condition(s) is a personal reading of slow films. I do not pretend that this book seeks to write the objective truth about a selection of films. Instead, I deliberately create a personal document to show the openess of the films and the ways in which they affected me in the hope that it encourages the reader to become more aware of what cinema can do. In many cases, slow films pose questions to which they do not necessarily offer a straightforward answer, if they propose one at all. They ask the viewer to become more active, more engaged and involved in the creation of meaning. The meaning of a film can be as manifold as the reactions to it."

excerpts from the chapter "Contemplation" in "Human Condition(s)" (2021)

 "Human Condition(s), An aesthetic of cinematic slowness" is the new book recently self-published by Nadin Mai (of the blog The Art(s) of Slow Cinema)