THERE IS NO NEED TO BUILD A LABYRINTH WHEN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS ONE: INFINITE RECURSION, ONTOLOGICAL VERTIGO, AND THE TERRITORY YIELDING TO THE MAP
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” – Jorge Luis Borges
There are those who imagine that a labyrinth is constructed from walls, corridors, and deliberate perplexities. This is an agreeable error. Any sufficiently intricate order, if contemplated for long enough, becomes a labyrinth: a city, a memory, a mirror, a genealogy, a library, an afternoon, the life of a man.
The films assembled here record certain encounters with that order. They concern themselves with doubles, mirrors, invented memories, counterfeit histories, stories that become worlds, and worlds that reveal themselves to have been stories all along. Their characters wander through impossible cities, recursive narratives, shifting identities, and worlds where originals and copies can no longer be distinguished. Together they form a cinematic labyrinth; not a puzzle to be solved, but a place to get wonderfully, productively lost.
This program is an invitation to wander through cinema's strangest landscapes, where every answer opens up to another question and the line between imagination and existence gradually disappears.
