A man sitting on a park bench with eyes closed, wearing headphones, a yellow shirt, and a blue jacket, enjoying music outdoors with green grass in the background.

Short-film

Inside.

As a bench located in a park, Harold feels that life has run dull, and the emptiness of his days is only filled with envy and regrets. But if there were a moment to remember, this was the day he met Ivan. He came out of the blue and brought awareness; they shared loneliness and connected deeply as if they were one. Harold has never felt so important, so part of the world around him. Then Ivan left, and Harold came back empty. Remembering this encounter makes Harold reevaluate his empty life's narrative. Perhaps if he looks openly around, as Ivan did, he will find purpose in his existence. Perhaps there were even equally meaningful moments to relate.

Directed by: Alex Soares Duarte

Music by: Rafaele Andrade

The image shows a green-tinted water surface with text at the top and bottom. The title 'Dead Zones' is prominently displayed in large, bold letters at the bottom, along with details about the documentary's contributors and description.

Documentary

‘Dead Zones’ is a documentary about oxygen deprived zones in the ocean and Dutch water quality. It was made on the occasion of the same-named multidisciplinary art-research project by visual artist Suzette Bousema.

Man-made dead zones are areas in coastal waters where micro algae blooms are fed by fertilizers from agriculture and other waste streams. When these blooms decompose, all oxygen is used by bacteria, and nothing is left for higher life forms. In the Baltic Sea, an are of 60.000 square meters is a dead zone. In the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi feeds a seasonal dead zone of about 23.000 square kilometers, as big as half of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands we have dead zones in a.o. Grevelingenmeer.

In the last 50 years, because of human impact and use of fertilizers for agriculture, the nutrient concentration has increased enormously, resulting in dead zones in coastal areas around the world. It has been calculated that now we have about 500 coastal dead zones, while in the 1950’s only about 50 existed.

Dead zones.

A horse with its head lowered, looking into a barn or stable in black and white, with a fenced pasture and other horses in the background.

Long film

Thelema

Thelema is a film started in 2012 as a short film named The Scourge of Angels that has been changed in its first years and transformed in a long film based on experimentation and poetry mainly German romanticism. A kind of a free composition found in Hoelderlin's Wie wenn am Feiertag poem, this piece speaks about Nature and the human's will to be integrated to the Earth as well freedom and memories before death.

This film has been conceited as a 30 minutes film with two different sequences projected simultaneously as a split screen and two different chapters being read at the same time while the soundtrack is totally live performed by another artist, Rafaele Andrade. She is a local music artist who I have worked with before and now lives in The Netherlands, where she has developed a 16-string electronic cello named Knurl.

Directed & produced by: Rodrigo Freitas

Soundtrack: Rafaele Andrade