Cinema is the only artistic
medium (other than photography, of course) that requires light
for its very existence. From the time the first frames are captured
in the movie camera to the projection of the completed work, "light"
is everywhere. This should serve to remind us of the essential
role that light plays in all our lives. Whether we are conscious
of it or not, we simply could not exist without the Light. As
we begin to awaken from our spiritual slumber and start asking
fundamental questions like "Where are we from?", "Why
are we here?" and "Where are we going?", the urge
also awakens within us to seek out the true answers to these and
other questions about the meaning of our existence. This has nothing
to do with following the dogma of any religion, but rather with
identifying those elements, which are indispensable to the
spirit within us. And every human being carries a special
longing for the Light (for the sublime) deep within his or her
soul. The greatest art of the past testifies to this; it
reflects the artist's search for the sacred and the transcendental. This
is precisely the substance of our film "Return to Light",
which features both of us as the principle characters.
The awakening of the
human spirit, although often filled with angst, is shown
in "Return to Light" as a sacred event. Indeed, the
desire to make this film arose out of the genuine need to experience
something of the truly sacred in cinema. This is what we show
in our film: the spirit's emergence from slumber, its desperate
struggle and its movement towards transcendence, towards the Light,
leaving the worldly behind. It is the journey inward, rather than
outward. And in order to do justice to the extremely personal
nature of this journey, we had to adopt a completely new film
language, which is at once universal and totally obscure.
We strove to create a pure film language, free from outside
influences, a language that could only use itself as a point of
reference.
"Return to Light" is more than just another film about spiritual emergence. By placing our lives directly into the film, we have turned it into an actual spiritual event, which unfolds right before the eyes of the audience. In its beautiful strangeness as well as in its unrepeatable longing for the sublime, "Return to Light: a Spiritual Odyssey" is in the most profound sense a living, breathing spiritual reality.
Art is...
"the conveyance
of spirit by means of matter." (Salvador de Madariaga)
"a treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime."
(J. F. Millet)
