Scylos (2021)

Scylos is a meditation on the nature of classical logic, in which contradictory states cannot co-exist. The film is inspired by the life story of a character described in Herodotus' Histories: the Scythian King Scylos, whose existence was split between his tribe of nomadic warriors and his civilised home in a Greek settler town. This double existence eventually led to his dramatic downfall. This contemplative film is composed from sequences shot in a small desert village on the edge of the Sahara in southeastern Morocco and at the IODP Bremen Core Repository, where thousands of deep-sea mud cores from all over the world are stored, sampled and analysed by scientists, who try to explain cycles of extinction and bloom in the history of the planet. In a mud core the whole of humanity is reduced to a speck of dust, and yet within each particle the cycle of birth, life and death is present.