El Moro 

El Moro

an essayistic poetic documentary  by Alexander Goekjian

What if the world is coming to an end much faster than we think?
El Moro tells the story of a middle-class man from Madrid who is afraid of climate change. He comes to a remote village in Andalusia, and undergoes a spiritual awakening through his encounter with its only inhabitant, a beekeeper.

Director's statement: In the city where I live everything new is a better version of what came before, and what is old is cleaned up and commodified - to be bought, sold, or rented out at ever increasing prices. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that I, like most of the people I know, are locked into a way of being and thinking from which it is hard to escape. It’s a way of thinking that puts ourselves, our ego, ownership and control at the heart of everything,  rather than any idea that we are part of something bigger, which we have to take care of, as the bees in the hive.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that as the world we know is radically changing, we need a new way of being. My desire to make this film is to create a contemplative response to the anxieties of climate change, by telling stories that allows the viewer to ponder possibilities for change, through imagination, through feelings, rather than through a rational exploration of problems and solutions. And to do this I decided to set the film in a strange place, induce my protagonist with this feeling of malaise that many people can identify with today, and then put him into a situation where he meet a person who is deeply passionate and anchored in what  he is doing and where he lives.

The film uses cinematographic means and spoken text to create something poetic which speaks to this condition. It combines a first-person semi-fictionalized off-screen voice, ‘subjective’ footage (stylized POV shots), as well as real-life documentary scenes, to engage the audience both intellectually and emotionally, with it's central theme of death and rebirth.

In ontwikkeling