The word ‘lapilli’ is a size classification of stone fragments that are violently expelled during a pyroclastic eruption.
These are molten material that harden into pumice as they hurtle through the air, sometimes landing in their molten form and solidifying where they fall to create strange, otherworldly rock formations. Formations like these – and many others – form one half of the subject matter of Paula Durinova’s feature documentary debut, Lapilli, which premieres in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition. The other half of her subject is the passing of her grandparents, an anguish that she works through by exploring and communing with the landscapes that she subsequently shares with us. Her beautiful film forms from a coalescence of geology and grief, a partnership that is as exquisite when you experience it as it is unlikely when you merely write it down.
Durinova begins to draw parallels quickly, to place the audience in the space she was herself inhabiting. In the opening moments she makes reference to her grandmother slowly petrifying as she lay in a post-Covid coma, and to the death of her grandfather shortly after as evidence of the pair’s interdependent existence across 60 years of marriage. She frames their death in ecological terms. Of course, all death is, in a sense, ecological, but Durinova’s personal connection to the earth in the wake of her loss transforms her grandparents into microcosmic allegory to an enormous process. She initially equates the death of her loved ones with the transformation of the Aral Sea, from the fourth largest inland body of water in the world in the 1960s, to a largely dried-out basin today. In the introduction she intones, “nobody could predict what its disappearance would uncover…” the fact that she could be referring to the lake or her grandparents is precisely the point.
At one point, Durinova observes that her grandfather was an experimental physicist, and her grandmother was very spiritual. She notes that examination was important to them, even if in one case it was an external endeavour and the other occurred inwardly. The filmmakers impulse, then, to combine the emotional journey with the physical world seems to make sense. Lapilli uses as its basic structure the stages of grief – which is typically separated into five parts: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. For the most part this is done in the voiceover, provided by the filmmaker, which narrates both the stories of her grandparents and her own musings. The visuals, on the other hand, are almost solely interested in the geological. However, there are ways this partition is eroded in both directions. Rather than labouring her structure by dividing the film into distinct chapters, Durinova instead attempts to evoke them through the landscapes, seeking out formations that mimic or evoke the bodily reactions to the various steps in the journey of grieving.
The kinds of images Durinova captures – she undertook all of the cinematography herself – find a variety of novel ways to present stark landscapes – though they are no less visually interesting for it. There are formations whose striations seem to mimic a stack of papers, while bubbling puddles shot in close up that might, upon initially appearing, have been ponds or lakes. The film includes extreme, mildly shaky close-ups of patterns in the rock, as well as wide sweeping vistas of shapes hewn by eons. As the focus shifts through different phenomena, caves begin to take on a significance and there are some spiritual moments of subterranean wonder accompanied by Petra Harmanova on the autoharp that give it both an eerie and transcendent quality. Perhaps most astonishing of all are the moments in which the formations really do begin to take on human characteristics. We are, of course, designed to looks for shapes and patterns but there are times in this film in which human forms feel almost as if they are conjured by Durinova’s words, by her search for her grandparents.
At only 65-minutes in length, Lapilli can hardly be accused of outstaying its welcome, but it is certainly possible that for those that struggle to attune to its frequency it could feel overlong. However, if catches you in the right frame of mind, its slowness feels patient and tentative, its diaristic qualities feel deeply personal. For many people, certain landscapes hold a particular potency that might not exist for others and may be difficult to articulate – Lapilli is an example of someone impressively, and generously, sharing hers.
Director, cinematography: Paula Durinova
Producers: Matej Sotnik, Viera Cakanyova
Screenplay: Paula Durinova, Dane Komljen, Tamara Antonijevic
Editing: Paula Durinova, Deniz Simsek
Music: Petra Hermanova
Sound: Agnes Menguzzato, Paula Durinova
Production company: Guca films (Slovakia)
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Slovak
65 minutes
Read more of the team’s coverage of KVIFF 2024.
