"There are not enough tongues to utter your fleeting name." A line softly spoken from the sophomore feature of Dane Komljen, a conceptually rigorous and unfiltered work which shines brightly through its rugged purity. Afterwater investigates, honors, and essentializes how bodies of water can materialize in both human and geographic forms. The elusive and ephemeral nature of water is explored in a 90-minute masterwork that traverses its various phases and modalities. 

Water can take on so many different identities, it can metamorphize swiftly. It can be liquid, it can be frozen, and it can be fog. Water can also sit in the ground in the form of a lake, it can fall from the sky in the shape of raindrops, and float in the air and steam us with an imperceptible presence. These three modes are presented loosely with three sets of characters featured in three distinctive chapters arriving in the present, past, and future. A rare work which holds gentle space for ambiguity, and the notion of reincarnation. It is a film that makes one wonder which ghosts of lives long past still linger around us. In the film's final chapter, we even have the opportunity to see physical human bodies of water float throughout the forest, slide across mud and caress moss and grass. The choreography of these moments is immersive and provocative in ways that can't be articulated.

Overall, there is much time to breathe within the work and words, co-written by James Lattimer, that caress and frame all of Komljen's concepts. "How light the raindrops' contents are… How gently the world touches me." A particular passage about how water's apparent calmness can mirror the sky reminds me of a poem written by the painter Agnes Martin titled The Parable of Two Equal Hearts. I suggest reading it after viewing the film and then going swimming.

 

Sofia Bohdanowicz
Filmmaker