As we were finishing the film in March 2020, I went dancing a couple of days before the spread of Covid-19 would make it impossible to do so for years to come. As I was surrounded by thousands of spinning bodies, enveloped in steamy air, weary, but oblivious of what lay before us, a thought crossed my mind: time is a riddle, and the answer is now. After this last dance, it seemed that everything but time had stopped. When I think of Afterwater now, it feels as if it's not from another time but about time itself, water and time, the water is running out, and time is running out. Where should I go? What should I do? Dane KOMLJEN

I Already Am Everything I Want to Have (2010), All the Cities of the North (2016), Fantasy Sentences (2017)

Flow Without Boundaries 
Dane Komljen’s languorous and transporting Afterwater explores the experience of lake bathing, taking fluidity as its guiding principle. Divided into three parts—each shot on a different format, set in a different time period, and featuring three performers—the film is best approached not as a work of narrative cinema but rather as a poetic and conceptual meditation on corporeality, nature, and the possibility of escaping from dominant modes of thought and experience.

The idea of human bodies being immersed in water is replete with religious associations, immediately summoning the ritual of baptism, which promises purification and initiation into the faith. Komljen retains the spiritual power of this act while cleansing it of any Christian associations, instead cultivating an immanent sensuality that is devoid of all moralism. The film’s repeated use of tripartite structures speaks to its insistence on refusing the reign of binarism, according to which the complexities of the world would be violently parsed into policed divisions such as male/female, human/nonhuman, or good/evil. In Afterwater, such Manichaean categories dissolve into an endless flow of difference. Komljen takes water not simply as a subject but as a way of thinking, crafting a film that abides by liquid principles, whereby borders and edges give way to interpenetrations and seepages.

At a time when many seek to reaffirm the boundaries of identity, Komljen explores what it might mean to allow them to wash away, to feel the self melt into the other and into the environment. Afterwater invites its viewer to do what its characters do: leave the city behind, drift, and experience the pleasures of being unmoored yet in relation to nature and each other. Erika BALSOM

Production Flaneur Films, Andergraun Films (info@andergraun.com), Dart Film & Video (contact@dartfilm.com)
Distribution Square eyes

2022 Festival de Seville Permanent Revolutions Award (Winner)

2022 Berlinale Caligari Film Award (Nominee)

2022 Cinéma du Réel Cinéma du Réel Award (Nominee)

2022 Mar del Plata IFF Altered States Competition (Nominee)

2022 Valdivia IFF Best Film (Nominee)