Extremes are not irreconcilable categories in the poetical world of Ground floor by Israeli director Asya Aizenstein.
Black is White’s neighbor, void itself is a possible occasion of fullness and the Flight is the very essence of a dream that you can experience only by firmly rooting your feet in the damp soil inhabited by shadows.
Within a few minutes of free fantasy, our video artist composes a small urban mosaic of impressions, always a step away from the lightness of the dream and always ready to slip into the framework of a nostalgic feeling of gentle loss.
The scale of grays on the discreet black and white palette never in search of contrasts, builds spans in which everything, even the sketcher’s contemplative eye, is transient and everything seems to contain its opposite and to be in turn contained.
So the pavement of the road is full of paper birds, while the electrical wires, stretched and tense in space as children’s games, fill up with the shoes tied together by their laces and suspended in the void of a desire to never leave again.
The very bed sheets – laid out to dry on invisible wires – are now white and now black depending on the rush of the wind that fills them with life impression, but always seems about to tear them away from that shy invisible bond that ties them with their sense of Home. That same wind that raises in flight birds of paper, now placid then akin to the rush of a subway ride that opens windows of light in the blackness of a night uninhabited and yet full of lives.
There are no people in these animated pages, in these tables soaked by the desire to dream rather than simply a dream. Only the poet’s eyes, from the dark ground floor, let the wind fill itself. That same wind that is thrill of flight, if you simply dare to close your eyes.
Beyond the author’s need to stand with her back covered by a recognizable manner, what really stands out in Ground floor is her ability to carve out a niche of personal expression and originality. Especially in the ability to fill the blank with a timid, fearful, fragile hope under the gusts of a wind that always seems about to sweep away houses and not only birds, dreams and not only leaves. All this is made possible by a very careful organization of the soundscape in which Yonatan Albalak,’s perfect music finds its place, evanescently.
So in the end the magic consists in the discovery of possibilities of dreams so close to reality. Such a discovery takes courage. And that bit of utopia that is born out of the intuition that White is just the other side of Black and that every night makes always room for another day.