Physical Culture

In a remote gas station in the heart of winter, a place where time stands still, three strangers cross paths and reshape time in their own way.

Anima, the latin word for soul, refers to movement. Does this mean that objects are without soul? Anima Animae Animam pulls us into the world of puppets. It is a tribute to the people who dedicated their lives to sharing their souls with beings that never had them. It's for the people who gave their voices to objects that had so much to say; old forgotten stories. It is a tribute to the puppeteers who, due to their profession, were not allowed to be buried in cemeteries because they were considered soulless.

Shot in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit in Lithuania, Eglė Budvytytė’s Songs from the Compost is a poetic and hypnotic exploration of nonhuman forms of consciousness and different dimensions of symbiotic life in the forest: interdependence, surrender, dying and decay.  The life cycles of the forest offer an alternative vision: here, when things die, they break down and merge into the earth to be reabsorbed by other living forms, like moss, mushrooms, insects and bacteria.

Featuring solo performances by choreographer Mami Kang, the film's song lyrics draw on the work and words of biologist Lynn Margulis, celebrating the role of bacteria in making life and the collaboration between the single-cell organisms possible, as well as concepts by the science-fiction author Octavia Butler, who employed tropes of symbiosis, mutation and hybridity to challenge hierarchies and categorisation.