Ural – Iceland Transcendental | Daniel Howard Newton

Movie Sol,
For Moscow Biennale Art Festival 2015

Experimental movie addressing the questions of the meaning of one’s existance, the dream like matter of reality and search for true self. Movie is a LOOP. Filmed in Iceland.
MOVIE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFAeo98R6YI
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/145320579
Director – Daniel Howard Newton,
Director of Photography – Jonathan Devany,
Actress – Michalina Joanna Skiba,
Ediotors: Stefania Thors Mus & Kott,
Sound design by Nico Vatenin and De Montage Art Collective,
Costume designer and make up artist: Michalina Joanna Skiba

Iceland is Eurasia’s outpost in the Atlantic. Like the Urals Iceland was born on the collision line between two ancient tectonic plates – Eurasian and North American – becoming the highest point of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. But unlike the Urals Iceland still lies above an active hotspot which is believed to have brought the island into existence 16 to 18 million years ago. Iceland is in a process of constant change and rebirth, its landmass and surrounding seas are characterised by repeated volcanism and geothermal phenomena such as geysers. And who knows – it could be that many active volcanos embellishing the island’s landscape are in reality gateways to other worlds. This little piece of land sitting on top of a giant cauldron of magma just across the Arctic Circle from the Ural Mountains seems to bubble over with transcendental energy reflected in the mythology and dreams of its Norse settlers.

For many centuries Iceland was also the final frontier for European and Eurasian civilizations from whose shores Vikings and, before them, Celts made their sorties to North America, Greenland and Arctic islands populated by strange and otherworldly Skaeling and Inuit.

The Urals and Iceland are two of the many special places in Eurasia that are filled with special energy that fed and maintained cultures whose myths and stories bear many similarities.

Sunna – the sister of the Moon

Very often we find ourselves feeling that we are in the wrong place or that the decisions we make are working against us or just get a feeling of being lost. “Sunna” is a film dealing with a person’s search for their true self. The developed world we experience today, constantly jostling for our attention, leaves little time, if any, for self-contemplation and experiencing the present moment. Our sensation of the transcendental is forgotten or interpreted as a transferable documentable moment which has some kind of currency as part of our manufactured self that we project into the world as our self. Our dreams become interwoven with this constructed world we create and our interpretation of surrounding reality restricts and insulates us from it. Ideas are not real. They are just thoughts and decisions we make but they have no bearing on what is happening now and our attempt to make our experiences ones we think we want are always going to leave us disappointed.

“Sunna” is a simple series of images that attempt to let us experience sound movement for the time people chose to experience it. The concept is simple. You can spend all the time you like trying to find yourself but you are already yourself and always have been.

Iceland being an island located above a massive energy source is a place where people have had a unique opportunity to cut through reality as it is, to see the world in its nakedness behind mental mirages and perceive themselves beyond mundane social and cultural constructs. The film will explore these issues invoking some of the themes to be found in Icelandic, Norse and many Eurasian folklores as well as shamanic teachings and practices. These photographs and moving images investigate the realm of spirits and pathways into these distant worlds of whose existence we are aware only subconsciously. Perhaps there are real passageways to transcendental worlds in the Urals or maybe they exist in Iceland in the form of the Tree of Yggdrasil on whose branches all nine worlds rest. But the key that can open the gates to the passages and Yggdrasil’s nine levels can be found only though our rediscovery of ourselves.

Henry Adams Bellows translation: from the Poetic Edda a collection of Old Norse poems

The sun, the sister of the moon, from the south

Her right hand cast over heaven’s rim;

No knowledge she had where her home should be,

The moon knew not what might was his,

The stars knew not where their stations were.