A MILLION​
Feature Film by Arata Mori
​2019
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I. Imagine
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In 1271, Marco Polo set off on his long journey to the east with his Father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo, to meet Mongolian Emperor Kublai Khan. Twenty-four years past, he came back to the west and wrote a manuscript about his journey in collaboration with a writer Rustichello da Pisa. Although people read his manuscript, they were suspicious about the authenticity of the unseen cities in the east that he described.
Marco Polo was thus given a nickname A Million of Lie.
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II. Dream of X
Woman X dreams that she is in a room of an isolated house in forest.
One day, she receives a letter, signed by Woman Y, that begins in small letters “Dear X”.
As X reads the letter, Y tells a story about how she felt deeply betrayed by X’s past lie to her and that she left her city and went on a journey to an unknown city.
III. Shining Dark
As Y arrives at a city, she sees people collect Shining Dark. The city’s inhabitants collect them with a net as if they catch a butterfly. The Dark projects light, in the very moment it is caught, not in the core of it but in people’s mind.
At one night, Y observes a man swallows the Dark and becomes a bug. As soon as it gets into his inside, his whole body is covered with strong light. And in the next moment, he spews out transparent thread from his metamorphosed mouth.
In the next morning, Y sees a number of threads are spread to outside from the windows of houses and buildings and woven with each other in the sky.
The threads are woven together to create a piece of huge fabric that floats above the city. In the course of time, the woven threads start to illustrate the image of the city on the fabric. However, when it gets bigger and covers the whole city, the actual city is left in the shadow of the fabric. The inhabitants thus choose to move to the doubled representation of the city on the fabric*.
Y describes this new city as a very strange place ”to be more real than a real city” and “It is transparent and invisible, but has so many color, shapes and forms at the same time. It emits light that nobody can see.”
IV. Emergence
Sooner or later, the doubled city gets woven together by threads with the other representation of cities on other sides of the planet. The gigantic web of the invisible cities completely cover the whole planet, preventing the shine coming down on the ground from the star of Truth. It creates a pitch-black darkness on the planet, absorbing everything into the darkness, mountains, lakes, icebergs, deserts, buildings, cars, planes, traffic signs and sign boards.
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A complete blackness emerges.
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People emerge into butterfly and dance happily in the atmosphere, celebrating the birth of the new god they named as Lie.
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V. Dream of Y
Y finishes her letter with the last sentences:
“I don’t know anymore if the city I traveled was actually real. My memory seems to have absorbed to the darkness that the threads caused. What I have seen in that city seems to be lost in the depths of the cave with a million of crystal inside that shines dully. I don’t know anymore if you really lied to me, if you are still alive or ever existed yet. Now, I am in the cave, having this circulating dream of you.”
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*In “Simulacra and Simulation”, Jean Baudrillard cites a fable of Jorge Luis Borges that a great Empire creates as a large map as the Empire itself and, when the Empire decays, only the map survives.
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The Film "A MILLION" is a fiction-documentary film about city, urban, people, thing, image and exchange. The film is in a post production phase and in search for any sort of supports to complete it.
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DIRECTOR'S BIO
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Arata Mori is a Berlin-based Japanese Filmmaker.
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He lives and works in Berlin, since 2013, after having graduated in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. His creative practice crosses over the fields of filmmaking, dance-theatre, architecture and visual arts.
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In his work, Arata Mori focuses on the concepts such as the relation of Body and Image and the relation of Body and Thing by means of film, that is related to time and non-material.
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INQUIRY / SUPPORT
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