Spheres

A lone man, both feet firmly on the ground, stands amid a verdant field. Engaging his body to gain momentum, he throws a wooden slat up into the sky, which quickly disappears on the horizon. The camera starts rotating, revealing various vistas: a small village, a deserted bench, a campfire, a lake. The camera continues to pan, restoring its focus on the man, when suddenly the wooden slat strikes him in the back of the head, piercing his skull. The hero dies. Far from being an inescapable climax of life on screen, death in the prologue of Daniel Zimmermann’s Spheres presents the start of a metaphysical journey that takes the man along. The fatal injury sets in motion the man’s existential search for meaning and a radically new way of thinking and feeling as he is transcended into a pool of his consciousness.

Every revolution of the camera becomes its own empirical space in Spheres. Continuing along the formal lines of Zimmermann’s previous film Walden, Spheres uses 360° sequences not only to place the viewer in the midst of the scene of action, capturing everything it encounters, but also to create 10 immersive spaces of experience where mind-expanding practices play out. In this cinematic endeavour, Zimmermann in collaboration with the invited artists and performers (Robert Steijn, Lilach Pnina Livne, Linda Samaraweerová, Dana Michel, and Yoan Sorin) use the 360° stage to translate their artistic practices dealing with spirituality and shamanistic rituals into cinematic experiences that grapple with existential themes.

As the camera spans onward, the film crafts various parables, interrogating the old logic of observation, the relationship between the body and terrain, and the reversal of hierarchy and loss of power, among others. Moving unhindered through 90 minutes of its runtime, Spheres goes through different stages of narrative development, akin to those of transcendental meditation, before it culminates in the catharsis, which gives birth to a new perspective. Old memories are burned on the water as the man bids farewell to the past, (re)entering the world at last with his first attempt at a dance with wooden strips. (Sevara Pan)