Belgium, 2003,11’
We watch yet another dream – at first sight more appealing but underneath no less essential and bloody – in the short film Kismet (2003) by a young artist Shelbatra Jashari. Kismet captivates and lulls into pleasure with its dreamy visual image (expressive black and white images, filmed on a 8mm reel, running and overlaying; in the rustle of often indefinite forms, there are distinctive motifs of female body and face) that reads like a successful compliment to the legendary Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren (1943). But there, in the world of intoxicating and irrational sequence of beautiful images where Maya Deren sixty years ago paranoically searched for (only) her own identity, Shelbatra Jashari today looks for the identity of an entire generation. The generation of young girls from the East who dream of revolution. Namely, if watching the film attentively, one in the darker and more abstract pictures soon recognises the images of (predominantly) religious violence and war which irrevocably gives the dreams – the same as it was the case with Mania Akbari – the status of a nightmare. A nightmare that is ‘dreamt’ with our eyes open.
