Aleph

2021 - USA/Croatia/Qatar - 91m
Arabic, English, Greek, Nepali, Serbian, Spanish, Thai, and Zulu with English subtitles

In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends from Argentina to Greenland to South Africa, with plenty of pit stops along the way. Ultimately, they are all part of the same expanse, a continuum containing the entire universe. Radivojević’s puzzle-like film is amusing rather than heavy-handed in its philosophical journeying, adding a few new wrinkles to the cinematic conventions of time and interconnectedness.