Buried in light

In this work originally commissioned as a multi-screen installation, Cohen meditates on ‘a time between times’ as he travels through Central and Eastern Europe. The filmmaker invests his own dreamily elegiac images of sites of past horror and devastation with ‘found’ commentaries taken from radio announcers and museum guides. With a considered use of archival material, Cohen restores a deep and affecting agency to the ghosts of the past, even as he signals a concern with the encroaching signs of change being wrought on contemporary European societies. A lightness emerges, ultimately, in Cohen’s visually poetic and spiritually consoling ‘seven possibilities for colour beyond advertising’; a wry melancholy postscript the filmmaker proposes as a parting gift.