Filmed in 16mm in the Andes Mountains, “Earthearthearth” shows contour lines drawn by the faint light of dawn that breaks through the darkness where the mysteries of heaven and Earth lie. Just as nocturnal and hypnotic are the sound improvisations by sax player Jason Sharp, which score this journey amidst flashes of light, allowing glimpses of a desertic landscape that successively disappears, giving way to absolute blackness; we remain listening. In this darkness, life announces and extinguishes itself, just as in the cycle of days on Earth – which, as Daïchi Saïto reminds us, is also itself body and “flesh”, flesh of images; “echoes of bones”, of those who dare, during their short existence, to cross it. Light and color turn earth’s surface into a poetic visual experience close to abstraction, exploring the plasticity of images in a sensory experience through which we scrutinize the beats of this body-earth, interspersed with ours. “And all the dead lie ahead of us”. A Japanese filmmaker based in Canada, Saïto has also lived in India, an experience that seems to echo in this meditative journey with which he returns to Curtas Vila do Conde, where he has presented his work over the last decade, having also been a member of the Experimental Competition jury (2011). (RaM)