Between Temples

At a time when competing interests and ideologies are disputed in blood, bombs, and climate altercation, we long to build a peaceful place instead. Between Temples is a world at once familiar and quite unlike any place ever known. Its lusciously lyrical real-film images meld brilliant living forests with stony cemetery sphinxes and angels - representatives from religions gone and very present. Migrating monarch butterflies, mysterious liquid globes falling sideways, movements of a soft-focus black cat, and shimmering wet surfaces speckled with tiny floating flowers create a glistening, intertwining melange of vibrant life in dark frames. Haunting temple songs layered with urban traffic rhythms clash against their vanished walls in this wild sanctuary. Immanent and otherworldly, with its icons of religions and non-religion, this film illuminates one place all these interests play and pass on together: between the temples. Here, in our minds, we entertain the gods which code our moral aspirations and the environmental catastrophes of their otherworldly focus. Here, between our faces' temples and the temples of official doctrines, we can also imagine another way and change our course. A celebration of the power, depth and ordered creativity of the unconscious imagination, this film was composed entirely in a dark camera cavity. Its overlapping images were crafted through instinct, memory, and chance on only one roll of film exposed nine times, and revealed in whole after development. —Frances Nkara