About the Film
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” – Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern.
The film’s title comes as a reference to personal kingdoms. In the science of Psychoanalysis, Anima, Latin for ‘soul’, is used in reference to the unconscious self. Anna, a music conductor, suddenly leaves her job in Saint Petersburg and decides to live in solitude in the forest by the sea. In a desperate attempt to bring her back to her life in the city, a chorister in Anna’s former band interrupts her seclusion.
Russian director/photographer Liliya Timirzyanova depicts through the film a dream-like nature. We explore the fluidity of time, where there are no boundaries between dreams and reality or between characters, as the chorister’s voice becomes Anna’s. Her visual patterns portray the inner world of Anna’s unconscious world, reflecting its complexities and repercussions.
Anna has a lot of contradictions; she has a calm, melancholic face that masks her inner screams. She is an artist torn between her passion and anguish for art, while searching for her soul under the remains of her fears.
One of the visual motifs in the film is seen with the pair of hands moving throughout the void, in the same movements of a conductor before his orchestra. These hands are once seen eaten up by the ants, suggesting the same impact of Anna’s conflicting desire to return to her art on her soul. Likewise, the film ends with a pair of blood-stained crucified hands, which successfully breaks free. Anima is a film about a woman reborn at the peak of her suffering.
The film presents a distinctive visual experience, blending the aesthetics of photography and contemporary dance. We can see that in the stillness of the scenes and the camera’s slow movement or how the body moves. This film owes a lot to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in terms of story we have a woman who lurks while living an existential dilemma. In both films one woman is talking while the other gets away with her silence so the dialogue turns into a monologue.
Ahmed Ezzat
