Stella Polare

Stella Polare is a contemplative video essay in which the ‘narrator’ plays a central role. We find ourselves in a port somewhere in old Europe and observe the people who wander along the quayside by the beach. The narrator remains on the fringes of this world; he observes the traffic of strolling people and the stream of consumption. He is mortal, just like the others. Just like the viewer. The city in which we find ourselves in specific, yet representative of many other Western cities; both fictional and real, the civilians seem to walk – or to sleepwalk – through history, in a mixture of memory and forgetting. Ian Wiblin and Anthea Kennedy, both from the Stephen Dwoskin ‘stable’, have already revealed their highly personal approach to cinema and the world in which we live in previous films. Key concepts in their somewhat cryptic film Stella Polare are for instance history, war, contemporary politics, the build up to the World War I, witnesses to military warfare and the subjective connotations of a concept such as terrorism. It is only during the final titles that the viewer understands the origin of the wise, rather melancholy, rather disjointed words of the narrator. And still, many questions remain open. Or rather, this is when they start. (EH)