FOCUS: IMMORTAL

We often think of immortality as the opposite of death.
But what does it mean to be mortal?
Is it only the death of the body?
A person can die and remain alive in memory.
A civilisation can disappear and survive in its myths.
A homeland can be lost and continue to exist in imagination.
A machine can become obsolete and still carry the memory of an entire world.
Perhaps immortality is not the refusal of death, but the refusal to disappear.
And cinema has always been a way of making things remain.
André Bazin called cinema “objectivity in time.”
Every image preserves something that has already passed.
“To live is to learn to live with ghosts.” — Jacques Derrida
We live with what has disappeared: with our dead, our memories, our ancestors, our lost worlds.
Immortal brings together films that explore what survives after death: bodies, memories, love, myths, civilizations, objects, ghosts and images.
From worlds destroyed and rebuilt, to forgotten motherlands, dying forms of cinema, ancestral memories and bodies that outlive the people within them — these films ask what remains when everything else is gone.
They do not promise eternal life.
They confront mortality.
They search for what refuses to disappear.
This is not a celebration of immortality.
It is a refusal to be mortal.