Scalamare (film 2017) 

Few years ago I was invited to the Cinematica festival in Ancona. 
While being there, I was taken to the Monumento ai caduti, with 
its impressive stairs leading into the Adriatic sea. I stood on top 
of these steps and looked at my own shadow lying on them in all 
kind of abstract rectangles. I found this very telling and symbolic, 
and I realized how thin is the line between life and death, and 
decided to make a short film inspired by these impressions. 
The symbolism of the place is easy to understand. There is the 
monument dedicated to the soldiers who fell in the war, there are 
the stairs which can lead you up or down, there is the life giving 
and life taking sea.  
 
Also the plot for the movie is simple: A couple who spent forty 
years together are celebrating the anniversary of their honeymoon, 
which started on these steps. So here they are again, forty years 
later, on the same spot, looking back at their lives, trying to come 
to terms with it, and trying to look into a very short and unsure future. 
With tears and laughter, with humor and sarcasm, they try to reenact 
some of the moments they shared in the past. The seemingly important 
moments are diminished by the time passed, some of the negligible 
events become prominent. The eternal struggle between microcosmos 
and macrocosmos is ever present. All values change and there is 
some kind of feeling of loss and nostalgia in the air. The celebration 
of their honeymoon starts turning into hallucination and illusion, 
in which the line between reality and fantasy no longer exists. 
Only the shadows are the silent witnesses ....

                    Jiří Kylián – August 2017