Breathing Spaces
New films by Ewelina Rosinska, Eva Giolo, Sally Lawton and Eiko Soga
Elizabeth Dexter
Unstable Rocks
Director EWELINA ROSINSKA
Year
2024
Country GERMANY, PORTUGAL
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Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths
Director EVA GIOLO
Year
2025
Country BELGIUM, ITALY
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Post Partum Film
Director SALLY LAWTON
Year
2024
Country USA
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Scent Line on a Moving Mountain
Director EIKO SOGA
Year
2025
Country JAPAN
In On Breathing (2025), Jamieson
Webster puts forth that breathing, a constant tempo and inescapable contact
from the rupture of birth, has been vanished through the psychoanalytic process
of amnesia. If “the memory and thought of breath gives us some courage [...]
reminds us of our capacity to offer care to something delicate that traverses
our lives,” then maybe the films in this programme offer an attentive
through-line to early life, air and breathing—one expressed visually through
depictions of infancy and childhood, sonically through language and its
absence, and in the rhythms of containment and release.
Speaking and therefore language are breath transformed. Eva Giolo’s film, Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths, explores breathwork—sharp intakes, trills of the tongue, plosives, and rhythmic breathing—and plays with the notion that the body, breath, and language are bound together: breath is what we take in from the world and push back out as language. The way the minority Rhaeto-Romance language Ladin is used in the film, sounds not quite placeable, taught incrementally, feeling like early language accrual. Language itself is foreign—it precedes you, and you must accommodate it in you, relational like the air. The Hokkaido Ainu language in Eiko Soga’s film Scent Line on a Moving Mountain, spoken by few elders in the region, figures similarly as an exploration of breath in the singing of Ms Kane Kumagai. But here breath is not only physical, it becomes cultural, too: a ritual and a memory. The air becomes a membrane, a site where affect moves with language and knowledge. The passing on of sustainable cooking and foraging traditions allows these practices to move through a space that informs and creates them, as the myths and communities of the Italian Dolomites do in Giolo’s film.
We might frame language here not only as communication but as intrusion—an other’s presence inside the mouth—invoked by the holes and round forms of Giolo’s film. Oscillating between the openness of those green mountains, and the encasement of caves, between agoraphobia and claustrophobia, the film plays too with the notion of birth and first breath—a break from the secure world, into the uncontrollable outside. The claustrophobia and dilated time in Sally Lawton’s Postpartum Film, which curls around the filmmaker’s experience of the postpartum period, turns breath into the sound of someone refusing to speak—or not knowing how. An inflatable device that increases pressure on the arm hisses when released. The opening image and sound of small waves lapping against a concrete structure jutting into a body of water, returned again with an empty pram on this same ramp. These images seem to grapple with the difficulty of navigating a body that is filled with life and then made lonely, inhaling and exhaling, re-establishing a relationship to itself and its surroundings. Some way into Postpartum Film, negative thoughts slide laterally, typed out across the screen, crucially unspoken.
Ewelina Rosinska’s Unstable Rocks was made over the course of the filmmaker’s relocation from Germany, and the birth of a child. Though it registers mostly the physical environment the film feels connected to the question of air, expressed in the sounds of gaitas de fole and raspy flute playing, and the images of birds (blindfolded birds, palm-sized birds, enormous sharp-feathered vultures). The appearances of medical masks, so ubiquitous throughout the pandemic, and controlled burns to reduce the wildfires so common to Iberia, speak to asphyxiation and the increasing difficulty of air in ecological catastrophe. Perhaps air’s new life as something threatening invites a turn to degrowth and smallness. The film’s rhythms and pace bring about a sense of balance, but in its quietest moments of stagnant green waters and the dam, there’s a sense of stifled breath, both personal and collective–a transitional breath, maybe.
Webster writes that: “From the moment of birth, breathing is something we must do for as long as we are alive, yet for the most part we don’t pay it much notice.” Though the programme takes us many, many places, geographically, emotionally, culturally, the films undo the amnesiac operation “to attend again to something we have forgotten,”—opening up the possibilities for a braver breath. Inhalation and exhalation as acts are already in touch with the question of letting go, already a recognition of loss. These poles of birth and loss, and all the movements in between, conjure a cinema that holds and releases—that suspends, rather than resolves.
Elizabeth Dexter coordinates the Talks and Workshops programme and is an Associate Programmer for Open City Documentary Festival.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Unstable Rocks’ at Close-Up Cinema, 10 May 2025.
Speaking and therefore language are breath transformed. Eva Giolo’s film, Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths, explores breathwork—sharp intakes, trills of the tongue, plosives, and rhythmic breathing—and plays with the notion that the body, breath, and language are bound together: breath is what we take in from the world and push back out as language. The way the minority Rhaeto-Romance language Ladin is used in the film, sounds not quite placeable, taught incrementally, feeling like early language accrual. Language itself is foreign—it precedes you, and you must accommodate it in you, relational like the air. The Hokkaido Ainu language in Eiko Soga’s film Scent Line on a Moving Mountain, spoken by few elders in the region, figures similarly as an exploration of breath in the singing of Ms Kane Kumagai. But here breath is not only physical, it becomes cultural, too: a ritual and a memory. The air becomes a membrane, a site where affect moves with language and knowledge. The passing on of sustainable cooking and foraging traditions allows these practices to move through a space that informs and creates them, as the myths and communities of the Italian Dolomites do in Giolo’s film.
We might frame language here not only as communication but as intrusion—an other’s presence inside the mouth—invoked by the holes and round forms of Giolo’s film. Oscillating between the openness of those green mountains, and the encasement of caves, between agoraphobia and claustrophobia, the film plays too with the notion of birth and first breath—a break from the secure world, into the uncontrollable outside. The claustrophobia and dilated time in Sally Lawton’s Postpartum Film, which curls around the filmmaker’s experience of the postpartum period, turns breath into the sound of someone refusing to speak—or not knowing how. An inflatable device that increases pressure on the arm hisses when released. The opening image and sound of small waves lapping against a concrete structure jutting into a body of water, returned again with an empty pram on this same ramp. These images seem to grapple with the difficulty of navigating a body that is filled with life and then made lonely, inhaling and exhaling, re-establishing a relationship to itself and its surroundings. Some way into Postpartum Film, negative thoughts slide laterally, typed out across the screen, crucially unspoken.
Ewelina Rosinska’s Unstable Rocks was made over the course of the filmmaker’s relocation from Germany, and the birth of a child. Though it registers mostly the physical environment the film feels connected to the question of air, expressed in the sounds of gaitas de fole and raspy flute playing, and the images of birds (blindfolded birds, palm-sized birds, enormous sharp-feathered vultures). The appearances of medical masks, so ubiquitous throughout the pandemic, and controlled burns to reduce the wildfires so common to Iberia, speak to asphyxiation and the increasing difficulty of air in ecological catastrophe. Perhaps air’s new life as something threatening invites a turn to degrowth and smallness. The film’s rhythms and pace bring about a sense of balance, but in its quietest moments of stagnant green waters and the dam, there’s a sense of stifled breath, both personal and collective–a transitional breath, maybe.
Webster writes that: “From the moment of birth, breathing is something we must do for as long as we are alive, yet for the most part we don’t pay it much notice.” Though the programme takes us many, many places, geographically, emotionally, culturally, the films undo the amnesiac operation “to attend again to something we have forgotten,”—opening up the possibilities for a braver breath. Inhalation and exhalation as acts are already in touch with the question of letting go, already a recognition of loss. These poles of birth and loss, and all the movements in between, conjure a cinema that holds and releases—that suspends, rather than resolves.
Elizabeth Dexter coordinates the Talks and Workshops programme and is an Associate Programmer for Open City Documentary Festival.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Unstable Rocks’ at Close-Up Cinema, 10 May 2025.