Description
Somewhere we cannot explain, in a future defined by past idioms, when the consequences of reality have had time to wash over, there lived five women; a family of some sort. Ascending from youngest to oldest, there was Silisa, the tiptoer; Kysham the thinker; Titsa the brave; Anyela the strong; finally Yaba the willful. No one knows how to reach this world; rather the women that live in it have learned how to sustain their livelihood. They rely on each other to survive.
For generations, these women have all consumed the sun, which is their driving force. Each day, they collect objects that fill-up their entire home, the most mysterious being the lost postcards. These cards appear in the sand each day with messages from Crimea, signaling to other worlds; other times. These messages are the portal between their world and ours; through past present and future; symbols of memories and trauma.
Silisa, being the youngest, often ran far distances and played in her own secretive universes. When her family suddenly disappears one afternoon, she is forced to fend for herself. Feeling ungrounded and hopeless, she leans on the found objects for clues. On the coastline of what looks like we could be anywhere, the activity of a small group of women are the most significant movements that are left in this world.
Director Biography – Dalia Glazman
Born in Boston, MA, Dalia Glazman always had a passion for storytelling. She would spend hours in her own spaces crafting worlds for her characters. This has now manifested through her filmmaking. During her time at Bard, she investigated her Russian and Ukrainian heritage through manipulating elements of time, researching family history, and weaving in cultural references. She is most invested in merging different time periods to create new fantasy worlds in her experimental narrative works. Glazman mainly works in 16mm film and always creates her own sound designs. For Glazman, sound is the backbone of a narrative.
Director Statement
Red Dunes is a film that is an exploration into a setting; one that is steeped in motifs of a past that will always be fantasy to me. Therefore, I use folklore as a way to uncover elements of my family, and how the effects of collective trauma and memory percolate throughout generations. I play with timelines and linear chronology to highlight and isolate moments in time. I am attempting to construct a bridge between various timelines, and create a space where they converge and erupt into an amorphous time capsule. I find myself interested in the relationship between cacophony and silence; how sometimes the unspoken is more important than any words. I try to create sonifications for fantastical environments that create dissonance between sound and image. Rarely is there a moment of syncresis, and when there is, it is made more quiet than any other sound. Uncontrollable transmissions from a radio and mysterious sounds of machines that have not been touched for years echo over the film’s world. Voices only come in narrating forms, both in Ukranian, voiced by my mother, and in English, voiced by my sister. All of these elements are representations of Ruptures. Ruptures in time and space; ruptures in the familial and the natural. Ruptures that trickle into this world and reveal the cracks.
Project Type:Experimental, Short, Student
Genres:Fantasy, Sci-FI
Runtime:20 minutes 26 seconds
Completion Date:May 20, 2020
Production Budget:10,000 USD
Country of Origin:United States
Country of Filming:United States
Language:English, Russian
Shooting Format:16mm
Aspect Ratio:4:3
Film Color:Black & White and Color
First-time Filmmaker:No
Student Project:Yes
