Space #3

Space #3 is the final installment in the Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Space series released on 12 May 2020. Again, building upon Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, this third volume brings together another seven renowned international directors, each contributing a personal and philosophical meditation on pandemic life. The films in this anthology are directed by Yung Chang (Canada), Ildikó (Hungary), Annemarie Jacir (Palestine), Nanouk Leopold (the Netherlands), Teona Strugar Mitevska (North Macedonia), Victor Moreno (Spain), and Albert Serra (Spain). From conversations between stuffed animals and cosmic reflections on Earth’s confinement, to melancholy letters and surreal family rituals, Space #3 positions quarantine as where space, time, and identity are reframed.

Directors in this series begin to get more unique in their creative medium—Chang channels the feeling of endless entrapment of quarantine through the character of a papier-mâché doll in We Are In This Apart, depicting the existential nothingness of repetitive routine during lockdown, while offering a glimpse of hope through lockdown interpersonal connection; meanwhile, in Enyedi’s The Conversations of Donkey and Rabbit, two stuffed animals engage in a deep philosophical exchange, the experience of pandemic quarantine is contemplated through Plato. Leopold’s Don’t Lose Heart: A Letter to Yorgos is unconventionally filmed in vertical orientation, it demonstrates a quiet, torchlit journey through a home. With poetic narration, objects in one’s house are observed like archaeological remnants, but simultaneously, domestic space also acts as a silent witness to the lockdown stasis. Mitevska’s Family is an even more avant-garde and bizarre attempt; it presents an eerie sequence where the entire family dances in a greenhouse with a colossal face-like mask. Then, they all squeeze into a small bathroom, everyone is acting unnaturally, till a kid innocently says, “We will survive, but are we going to evolve? That is the question” (20:51–20:57). The surreal choreography, paired with a mournful piano score, speaks to the psychological compression of living together in crisis, and surviving together in crisis.

Jacir’s Disconnect utilizes the audio of a father-son phone call, layered over images of a small child. The conversation reveals the growing panic of pandemic but also the continuous fracture and disconnection: “This is how I feel. You feel different”, “Everybody is at risk. You are, your baby is, Ossama is. They are at risk”, “No no no no” (11:00–11:08). Moreno’s The Infinite Confinement, on the other hand, juxtaposes images from NASA, the film shifts scale from pandemic claustrophobia to cosmic existentialism, as the narrator says in Spanish, “Confinement is not easy. But let me remind you, that you’ve been confined on Earth you’re your entire life” (21:20–21:31). Lastly, Space #3 ends itself with Serra’s self-recorded monologue filtered with colourful special effect. In My Influences, Serra speaks about literary influences on his filmmaking—unrelated to any of the pandemic status quo, it functions as a kind of footnote or self-aware digression. Psychologically away from the crisis, so as to annihilate the crisis. In Space #3,the directors treat their homes as stages for abstract thought and artistic confrontation. During lockdown, the directors exist in a finite space with infinite landscapes.