Soon It Will Be Dark

What does it mean to inhabit or occupy a landscape or a frame? To conjure up time? These are deceptively simple questions that the artist Isabell Heimerdinger gives us an opportunity to ponder in her film SOON IT WILL BE DARK. The context is a stretch of coast, a tropical place where, dotted in the background, a few old, dilapidated colonial buildings survive. A patch of countryside, half-village, half-forest, bordering the sea, and where our gaze falls on a man as the days go by, while he busies himself with his task – from one spot to another, conscientiously clearing the land around the buildings with a machete in the luxuriant undergrowth of a dense forest of majestic trees. Measured, considered, precise and respectful movements…