Explora

Its title already a nod to the current moment, this typically bizarre new short film by Kienitz Wilkins adapts the northamerican classic children’s book Best Busy Year Ever, by Richard Scarry, filmming straight from its pages onto 16mm: anthropomorphic animals leading the good American life, perfect and perfectly ideological.

In a bedroom, sitting on the edge of an unmade double bed, a man looks out of a window at the falling snow. A blackbird settles on the windowsill and bursts into song. The man starts to sing over the melody; he tells of the killings he has done: his son, his daughter and his wife, while they were in their sleep. Lastly, he describes his own suicide. Little by little, one at a time, his son and daughter appear, and likewise his wife turns in bed, each singing in turn. Once the story is over, the blackbird flies away and the man goes back to looking out of the window.

The transcendental promise of psychedelic drugs versus a concrete and violent experience of metropolitan living. These two opposing realities form the backdrop for an adolescent encounter told through still images and written narration.

Twenty years ago, the towers of the New York World Trade Center collapsed. The endlessly repeating television images of this event were preceded by manyfold stagings of the building, either as a symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, such fictional motifs are strung together and become one: the symphony of city, a disaster movie and a medical trauma therapy video.