ANALOGICA SELECTION 15 - 2025

MAN OF ARAL
by Helena Gouveia Monteiro
16mm / 2023 / Ireland / 6’ 23’’

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Man of Aral is an experimental film created from satellite images of the disappearing Sea of Aral in Central Asia, showing the gradual decrease in water levels and the drastic transformation of the landscape as a result of human activity.
A digital time lapse sequence was created from these images, transferred onto 16mm film, and chemically manipulated by hand with colour tints and toners, which affected the images visually and materially, creating a unique—both digital and analog, both mechanically and manually composed—hybrid visual object. The soundtrack by Nicolas Clair was inspired by the original score composed by John D. H. Greenwood for Man of Aran in 1934.
As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the landscape and of the film material itself as competing human and geological timelines through distant views of a rapidly yet almost invisibly changing territory, a key event of unprecedented scale.

Helena Gouveia Monteiro is an experimental filmmaker and visual artist from Portugal, living in Dublin, Ireland.
Her work has been shown internationally in both gallery and cinema spaces, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Oberhausen IFF, Indie Lisboa, and Curtas Vila do Conde.
“Purkyně’s Dusk” (2021) is distributed by Light Cone Paris and "Man of Aral" (2023) received support from the Arts Council of Ireland.
She is the co-founder of Stereo Editions publishing collective, a member of L'Abominable/Navire Argo Coop Film Lab, and currently co-directs the LUX Critical Forum Dublin.