International Film Festival Rotterdam
VERDICT: Traditional fruit cultivation becomes a source of archival fascination in this sci-fi documentary hybrid set amidst environmental collapse.
Genuine 16mm documentary footage is reframed as archive material in a near future in Common Pear.
Director, cinematographer and co-writer Gregor Bozic first came to the old fruit growers of the Goriska region in Western Slovenia as a fellow propigator. His interest in cultivation and the traditional practices of the region were about documenting these people and their waning knowledge and about finding new ways to continue their work. His candid 16mm interviews with these farmers – as they worked the land, clambered wild pear trees, or reminisced about their situation – were intended as acts of witnessing, of non-fiction documentation. The few short years since the footage was shot have seen the people and the plants ravaged by pandemics and climate catastrophe. With Common Pear, Bozic and co-creator Marina Gumzi have formulated a science fiction framing device that beautifully transforms the original footage.
The film is set in a facility – a behemoth of concrete that rises in a world of yellow-tinged smoke and inhospitable heat. The workers retire to cooled pods for the hottest part of the day, awoken by a mechanical voice on a Tannoy that encourages them back to their labours. One of these workers (Dora Ciccone) spends a great deal of time in the dark of the video archive, poring over reams of all footage that hint to the traditions of a world now alien.
The footage itself is charming and luminous. People recount old stories to Bozic – one woman confessing to him of how she amended the planned route of some workers laying pipes to save a nearby pear tree. One man in his seventies demonstrates his vim by clambering up an enormous tree to look for wild pears. Through Bozic’s original lens these are melancholic vignettes of the sun setting on a particular way of life. In how the filmmakers have reconfigured the footage in Common Pear, they strike an ominous chord about how quickly and brutally such knowledge can be stripped away when we stop paying attention to it.
Director, cinematography: Gregor Bozic
Cast: Dora Ciccone, Joze Krecic, Jerneja Pincic
Producer: Marina Gumzi
Screenplay: Gregor Bozic, Marina Gumzi
Editing: Gregor Bozic, Lukas Miheljak
Sound: Julij Zornik
Production deisgn: Branko Hojnik
Music: Hekla Magnusdottir, Tim Gowdy
Production Company: NOSOROGI (Slovenia)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Short Competition)
In Slovene, Italian, English
15 minutes