Films

«The Seen and Unseen by Kamila Andini

2 reading minutes

written by Jonas Follonier · March 21, 2018 · 0 comment

Fribourg International Film Festival - Jonas Follonier

A hospital ward in Bali. The screen shows a blurred curtain, which suddenly opens onto the patient's den. This is the story of a sick child. «Tantra has a tumor in his brain [...] His senses are affected.» Words the mother doesn't understand. Can't understand. That the father tries to explain, acting as the doctor's intermediary. Tantra, the sick boy, has a twin sister, Tantri.

Carried by a real care for the image, the play of chiaroscuro and a well-dosed and well-placed score, composed by Yasuhiro Morinaga, The Seen and Unseen manages to turn this serious subject into an unsuspected poetry. While everything in the film is designed to make us feel out of place - even the notes of the Indonesian scale are not the same as those of the Indonesian - it's also an opportunity for us to discover a new dimension. fa and soil that we know - yet it all seems so familiar. For this is nothing less than a family's hope in the face of disease.

An escape into the imagination

Tantra suffers from a degeneration that has caused him to lose his senses. He can no longer feel hot or cold. He can't even feel his legs. «It's all the same,» he tells his sister. The drama is total. Overflowing with fatality. If, as the philosopher Berkeley argued, to be is to be perceived (esse est percipi), what is it to live without perceiving? Isn't non-sensation absolute nonsense?

To escape her brother's anticipated mourning, Tantri takes refuge in an imaginary world of birds, shadows and Indonesian mythology. In this magical world, the moon plays a key role, especially the full moon. The young boy himself compares himself to the moon: «I feel like the moon, so bright. But after a while, it loses its brilliance.»

In one scene, Trantra's sister, in hiding, overhears her mother breaking down in tears in the kitchen. At the very end of the film, Tantri lies against her brother, embracing him on his hospital bed, who can no longer feel anything. These two moments are just two examples of a film that succeeds at every turn, for one simple reason: The Seen and Unseen is at a child's level. A dream come true.