A teenager, Christina, loses her friends in the forest. Looking for them she finds the bodies of three drowned kids on the shore of a lagoon. On summer holiday, deep in the woods, three kids, cousins, are playing around a lake when they find a drowned young woman drifting in the water. Games, lies and rituals unfolding into a circular time in which death loses its ultimacy. What is real and what is a mirage? Who is dreaming and who is being dreamed?
"Apariciones" is a cinematographic essay on the question of what are apparitions, or what might they be. It’s a filmed documentation of the verbs “to appear” and “to disappear”. This film challenges itself by trying to make visible und perceptible these unseizable and sometimes invisible subjects. Apariciones is a collage-shortfilm, an associative definition, a visual thinking process, a physics of illusions. This short film uses a variety of different mechanical, chemical and digital techniques. It was partially filmed with quite "normal" film cameras such as the Bolex and ARRI Alexa. However, in the animation scenes several different photo cameras were used: a Canon 50D for instance, which was fitted with a self-made telephoto lens made of cardboard; a cardboard pinhole camera; a large-format Sinar camera 4x5 inches and a small-format reflex cameras Nikon FM and Canon 5D.
The materiality of reversal-film is being portrayed. This analogue technology, with its exposed chemical skeleton is clashing in an anachronistic filmic gag with contemporary digital animation. Colour is not presented as a natural, but a highly constructed medium in the expierence of film. This is a short experimental-essay which is questioning canonized and hegemonic film-rituals used to build and test cinematic-images.
