liberi soggiacete you, although free, are subject – Dante Purgatorio XVI Bladder by the Light was shot on 35mm on location across the Pacific; including Anacapa Island, Sitka, Diomede, and Niue. The film – destroyed by arson – accompanies Professor Casella Lazarev, a reclusive scholar of Paul Klee’s Notebooks as she struggles to summon her dreams. That is until she peers into a laboratory webcam documenting a kelp forest off the shore of the Channel Islands. Suspended in shadow and light, the epipelagic species begin to possess the professor, as her own circadian rhythms transpose across an elegiac dreamland where a cast of shades emerge out of the tidal canopy only to sink back into the abyss. Realising her life’s work was merely a crutch to access the ‘brood of night’ her dreamlessness previously denied, upon making contact with the seaweed-steppe and the parasocial relationships with its inhabitants, Lazarev shifts attention to archiving what the submerged eye captures. Ultimately the archive’s impartiality distorts, unveiling false awakenings and the undulations of surveillance, the ghosts of reveries, and what the cacophony of memory and remorse tell us about departed strangers. Alas, the original soundtrack – featured here in its complete form for the first time – is all that remains. credits released December 9, 2022