Călin Boto

Much has changed in the last decades, but the concepts of clarity and detail still dominantly inform our appreciation of experiences and knowledge, including art. So an unclear film such as Chilean filmmakers Luciana Merino and Pascal Viveros’ Towards the Sun, Far from the Center, engages with contemporaneity in ways unsuspected at first glance. And when I say that it’s an unclear film, I mean this in the most obvious way: its image, consisting of slow pans of Santiago taken from a bird’s eye view (at a pace different from that of a drone—maybe from a crane?) is zoomed-in so much that it seems bidimensional; not abstract, but plastic, toyish, slightly unreal.