Today I am in Verona for the third and final day of A Perfect Day Festival at Castello Scaligero, Villafranca headlined by Sigur Rós.
To get in the mood I have been rewatching the specially commissioned videos as part of ‘the Valtari mystery film experiment‘
Number 8 in this sequence is for the song Daudalogn. It was directed by Henry Jun Wah Lee and filmed in Yakushima, a remote island in southern Japan.
It contains stunning images drawn from the natural world. This is a more conventional visualisation of the Icelandic band’s spiritually uplifting music than most of the others in the series but no less memorable for all that.
The director writes : “I chose this location both for its unique beauty and because the story of Yakushima was representative of the often fragile relationship between humans and nature. the giant trees on the island were once revered as sacred by locals. they lived for thousands of years but for the past 5 centuries they were logged to near extinction. the scarred landscape coupled with the dramatic way in which the forest has recovered made for a picturesque and magical atmosphere”.
Jeanne d’Arc is an object lesson to contemporary filmmakers that it is images, not words, that are forged in the memory.
I love the simplicity of this 
