Winter

Winter
Director, Cynthia Madansky
16 mm ◊ 5 min.

5 minutes, 3 continents, 1 season—Winter is a beautifully enigmatic oddity in Cynthia Madansky’s work. If it’s work that feels atypical and unclassifiable—the film is, for example, among the artist’s sole exercises working with silence—it is in no small part due to the filmmaker’s decision to present her material without explicit classification. Fleet, and nimble, the film shifts in three movements from grey cityscapes, to bright, tropical vistas, and eventually muted and overcast skies, with the locales never specified. Less overtly political than other works, this open text nonetheless can be variously read as a comment on climate change, on borders, or our varied perspectives of the world. Or, simply, an exercise in observation.