14' min., Courtesy of the artist and Rodeo, Istanbul Superpower – Dakar Chapter reminds one of a tv soap opera crossed with a cheap horror film. If you look more closely however you see a sort of science fiction film. Shot in the capital city of Senegal, Dakar, the film unfolds as a complex scientific/fictional story, with its starring roles going to the three stars in the astral belt of Orion, in the human guise of three professors: Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. They are played by two local soap stars and an African artist. As an introduction, you are given the information about the three stars, and about light travel in general. Waller uses this astronomical information to underpin the central idea of the film, that the light we see on earth takes thousands of years to reach us, and in fact throws a light on our past. We follow the professors as they prepare to run interference on an extraterrestrial particle cloud causing temporal disturbances on earth. The characters slip in and out of several time zones, so that fantasy and documentary become almost interchangeable. Mark Aerial Waller rearranges and distorts the traditional logic of film, thereby producing a disjointed, psychological time travel film in which fact and fiction, past, present and future all blur. |