Be there in time. We recommend that you arrive at least 20 minutes prior to the start of the screening.

Over the course of twenty-two months, Johann Lurf fixed the gaze of a specially developed 65mm camera on a single fragment of the world: the Ottenstein Reservoir. What begins as a quiet observation of nature gradually transforms into a monumental image of cosmic motion. At first, the lake appears familiar – a place suspended between sky and water. But as the exposures grow longer, the dimensions themselves shift: stars begin to draw delicate lines, the sun inscribes bright arcs, the moon traces soft, almost calligraphic diagonals. The water surface becomes a perfect mirror that folds sky and landscape symmetrically into one another – above and below, light and shadow, becoming and fading.

A sensory voyage through a landscape created with destructive power.
From the depths of the earth emerges an impression of a natural world. Our senses are guided through time, movements and textures, revealing an estranged landscape created by limestone exploitation.

This film takes as its starting point the poem On the Wing by Christina Rossetti, which I encountered amidst a family health emergency that hung over my time at Film Farm. Fragments of scratched text flicker throughout the film’s distorted landscapes.

The film was shot on hi-con stock, mainly at night, using truck headlights as my light source. It was originally processed using a homemade developer made with comfrey leaves and then contact-printed and bucket processed again in the Atlantic Filmmakers’ Co-op darkroom.

At the heart of a river, two guardians—reminiscent of the Moirai—conduct a ritual analysis of the water. Wielding mirrors that capture and reflect light, they seek to purify the river, only to realize that pollution does not dwell in the water itself, but within humanity itself. In a final gesture of enchantment and confrontation, they turn the mirrors towards the viewer, inviting them to confront their own reflection.

The summer light endlessly scatters across river rocks, moss, and lichen, flickering on a land breathing under its own memory. Shot in the remote wilderness of southeastern Alaska, See Through the Hollowed Blue Hellebore draws from local oral narratives tied to glaciers and the land, intertwining echoes of Tlingit language. Floating, utterance stretches, repeats, and resonates, summoning a sensory journey through flora and fauna. Beneath each surface: a glacier receding, a body remembering.

Lectorium, Sevcable Port

Nature speaks slowly, and sometimes its voice appears through barely perceptible traces. In this program, the human encounters a scale that cannot be fully grasped. Disappearing territories of Alaska, underground caves, stellar cycles, and fragile ecosystems emerge as parts of a single larger process, where time is measured through the transformations of nature itself.

A landscape is never empty. It preserves human histories, natural catastrophes, ancient forms of life, and traces of our intervention. To look at nature here means learning to perceive what develops more slowly than we do.

74 min

Program:

1. Jiayi Chen, See Through the Hollowed Blue Hellebore (2026)
2. Rita Figueiredo, Guardiãs de um Sonho Lindo (2026)
3. Kate Solar, (for once I dreamed of you) (2025)
4. Jonas van der Molen,Voyage Souterrain (2025)
5. Johann Lurf, Forever…Forever (2026)

Saint Petersburg, Russia