Komorebi
2017 · 8m · Uruguay
Directed by Viviana Artigas
Genres: experimental, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An aeroplane pilot suffers an accident in a strange place that resembles nothing she has seen before. She does not know whether these are her last minutes of life, or her first.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise dangles between afterlife and genesis without committing to either—most scouts would call that a cop-out, but Artigas leans so hard into the visual estrangement that the ambiguity becomes the whole point, which is genuinely unsettling.
Komorebi situates itself carefully within the lineage of experimental cinema that treats landscape as character, recalling Tarkovsky's meditative registers while maintaining its own formal restraint—the editing resists narrative momentum in a way that feels considered rather than uncertain.
The decision to render the crash site in painterly, almost watercolor abstraction rather than grounded geography is what makes this work; that single aesthetic choice transforms a potentially precious premise into something that actually lands, because we're watching the pilot's consciousness refuse to resolve.