Hierophant
Jelena Markovic, Fiona Oliver-Larkin and Lucas Chih-Peng Kao
About
Featuring physical theatre and spoken text, this short film poem asks: How do we act and make decisions in the context of interdependence and contingency? How does a person carve out a meaningful life beyond the hero’s journey? After progress, is anything sacred?
Made as an international collaboration across Vancouver and Edinburgh, "Hierophant" features three characters and their quests for meaning. Through fragments of poetic dialogue, “case studies”, diary entries, and inner monologues spoken aloud, the characters reveal themselves and their life philosophies. One character, “Y”, is an action-oriented individualist, who embodies the classical rational agent progressing linearly towards a goal. The second character, “Miloš”, is aware of his interdependence with others but stuck in despair, swallowed up by his grief for ecological and human suffering. The narrator is at turns both individuals, as she alternates between the dichotomous poles of having a certain kind of purpose and despair at her failure to achieve it.