Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back filmmaker Vasilios Papaioannu with an evocative short film, A Poem, which connects urban and natural landscapes and sounds in a narrative that is disorienting and yet full of synchronicity. The titular poem is in the form of a text message from a woman who has left her lover and driven away. Vasilios synthesizes elements of her perception and memory: she is on the road, in a parking garage, in a room with a chandelier, on the seashore, in a field, on a path… Instead of seeing her in a physical location, we see with her mind’s eye as it flits from the necessary attention to drive and park a car into flights of fancy and memory. The imagery is moody, dominated by shadow and strange coloration and casts of light, as many dreams are. By submerging and replaying a waking experience in dream language, Vasilios illustrates the human mind’s capability of holding numerous realities at the same time via memory and imagination. The effect is mesmerizing, insightful, and full of longing.
Our minds have incredible potential for storing and accessing information. We can also see the potential for distortion and anxiety that stems from the way human brains function and visualize things that are not present. It’s hard to slow the mind down, especially if we are going through a difficult experience, such as the dissolution of a relationship.
“I deliberately separate sound from image to create parallel narratives that unfold simultaneously, allowing consciousness to inhabit multiple temporal planes at once. Linking camera movements across impossible geographies, I collapse physical distance into psychological nearness, enabling cinema to map interior space with the same precision it uses for external landscapes. These formal strategies emerge from a deeper investigation into how consciousness actually functions: not through cause-and-effect sequences, but through the constant navigation between presence and absence, the seen and the withheld, creating work that expands cinema’s capacity to represent the simultaneity of being physically present while mentally dwelling entirely elsewhere.”
View A Poem in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Vasilios Papaioannu is a filmmaker, photographer and mixed media artist currently based in Washington, DC. Papaioannu explores the fleeting dreamscapes of reality using noise, movement and disturbance. He hybridizes different modes of filmmaking, unifying variegated media, primarily 16mm film, digital video and archival footage. View his work at https://www.vasiliospapaioannu.com/.
His works have been shown in various venues around the world, such as the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Crossroads at SFMOMA, Anthology Film Archives, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Cork International Film Festival, Festifreak, Analogica, Cámara Lúcida, Engauge Film Festival, EXiS, L’ Alternativa, Antimatter [media art], Montreal Underground Film Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival and Sharjah Film Platform. Papaioannu holds an MA in Communication, Text Semiotics and Cinema from the University of Siena in Italy and an MFA in Film from Syracuse University in New York. Papaioannu is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications, Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Howard University.