Miška Mandić

The Fold explores how objects can disrupt our understanding of time through a series of bodily, sensorial and material metaphors. It draws on both science fiction and magic realist tropes to follow a man who is distracted away from a work call by a mysterious voice that repeatedly tells him ‘listen’, driving him further into remote bushland. There he unearths the The Orb, a character that proceeds to shapeshift into a series of minerals contained in a standard mobile phone.

The story is sometimes interrupted by a muscular, fleshy portal that enables narrative timeshifts between materials in different states of folding. These raw materials and landscapes, both interior and exterior, are compared and connected in different ways throughout the film; the atoms of iron in a mobile phone, become the atoms of iron flowing through the fleshy body, become the atoms of iron in a supernova. Each connection is a site of activity, ‘things’ in temporary configurations that point to more complicated and distributed processes and histories.

This film continues Miška’s cinematic investigations of ‘waste’ (the compounding residues of extractivist processes), to disrupt entrenched complacencies and provoke new ways of thinking and relating.