Moe Myat May Zarchi is a filmmaker and audiovisual artist from Myanmar and a graduate of the New York Film Academy (2016). Her films have won awards in the Singapore International Film Festival, Vesoul International Film Festival, and others. She has exhibited her works at the God House Tower (UK), the National Secretariat (Myanmar), and was a finalist at Julius Baer's Next Generation Art Prize in Moving Images. Moe founded 3-ACT, a cinema organization that publishes cinema magazines and orgazines workshops and festivals. She also co-founded MATTER Audiovisual Lab, the first interdisciplinary and experimental art platform in Myanmar. In her practice, she explores the metaphysical, identity, femininity, and revolutionary themes through the innovative use of visuals and sound. “The Altar” is one of her latest works.
“The Altar” is screening at Vienna Shorts
In experimental fashion and under ambient noises and whispering narration, we lister to a person relating a story which ends up with seeing an ant in the sink while washing their hands. In the meantime, varying photographs appear on screen, with minimal movement in them, sometimes fitting the narration, sometimes not. The man swimming and the ones in the forest stand out, the former for the way a sense of movement is induced into it by a scrolling technique, and the second with the drawing of ants in the photos, in a concept that points towards some kind of obsession.
The narration continues in a confessional way, with the person talking referring to the aftermath of drowning the ant, the sense of power they felt, and how they build a shrine for the bug in the garden, with the short then taking a ritualistic approach, indicated by image, sound and the narration itself. Photographs and sounds of birds follow, and a number of abstract images that induce the short with an otherworldly essence while the narration moves into sociophilosophical paths, talking about how everyone is like the ant in the sinkhole of the basin, and how they cannot change anything due to their size and insignificance, inevitably all falling to the hole. The next words, of some ants managing to escape the drowning and some having escaped their fate, add a note of optimism, which is almost immediately toned down by the admission of the narrator that they are still there, and the fact that the particular fate of everyone is not due to karma, but of natural law.
Probably the best aspect of the 10 minute short is the atmosphere, as shaped by the photographs, sketches and the minimal animation featuring on them, the music, and most of all, the whispering narration which results in a film that is equally ritualistic, mysterious, and audiovisually captivating.
Evidently, the experimental nature of “The Altar” makes it a film for a very specific audience, and probably more an installation than a film.
