Each year, the Berlin Fashion Film Festival showcases creative cinematic works produced for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands. One of this year's selections is a highly abstract animated fashion film called Metanoia. The film was made by designer Patricia Wu Wu in collaboration with Asad Khan, a CGI artist who grew up on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan and makes abstract, often fractal-based video art.
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The film opens with an abstruse microscopic shot of a red liquid compound with strange black specks in it. The scene is then interrupted by several patterned motion graphics before cutting to a mass of metallic-coated black bodies. Each time a new scene is introduced, it is followed by a sequence of morphing video effects that further distort the original image. The narrative of the film follows, "the transformation of matter undergoing changes resurrected from beneath," Wu Wu writes on her website. "Collecting all of our desires and deadly sins, it evokes the innermost of ourselves whereby the clothing acts as a metaphor for the by-product of our own ego; slowly swallowing us into an infinite whirlpool of darkness."
Metanoia is based around the concept of impermanence, one of the essential doctrines in Buddhism known as anicca (impermanence) that asserts that the existence of all temporal things, material or mental, is subject to change. It is a core principle of the Buddha's teaching and the first of the three marks of existence; the other two being dukkha, which stands for unsatisfactoriness or suffering, and anatta, the doctrine of non-self.
Wu Wu says the film tries to "embody the underlying essence and process of decaying matter as a conceptual approach towards fashion," something she attempts to demonstrate in her own clothing. The designer elaborates further, "The materialization of the immaterial transforms into a disturbing aesthetic of destruction through which the screen acts as a canvas for the maker to draw upon." Watch the full video below:
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