Shambhavi Kaul
SLOW SHIFT
USA, India 2023, 9’
Shot in Hampi, India, among the ruins of a 14th-century city, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is a landscape film of sorts. Static shots of massive boulders alternate with smallish rockslides. There is not a soul in sight, if not for monkeys eerily resembling humans. derelict architectures clearly built in ‘different’ styles denoting traditions very distant in space and time elicit a calm sense of despair. one cannot not think of the lunar landscapes seen in David Lean’s A Passage to India, or how Judy Davis felt those rocks alien. “The interest of the film, however, lies in how it raises the problem of conveying epochal change beyond the timescales of human life. With its precise, playful orchestrations of scale, perspective, and off-screen sound, … Slow Shift resembles nothing so much as the “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey stripped of any sense of prehuman advancement.” (Lawrence Garcia, Reverse Shot)
Shambhavi Kaul is an experimental filmmaker born in Jodhpur, India. She currently lives in the United States, where she is a professor at Duke University. Her films were selected in film festivals worldwide such as Toronto, Rotterdam, Edinburgh , New York, and London; the Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, and Experimenta in Bangalore. She has exhibited her work in many museums and had two solo gallery shows at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai.
Director: Shambhavi Kaul
Cinematography: Joshua Gibson
Editor: Lalitha Krishna
Sound: Jason Sudak
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