Boy in the Tree

One of the many things I love about Aneel's works, is that words are never pronounced unless where specifically needed. This is important. Not only the photography is beautifully sincere and discreet (but far from weak; actually it's its strength, I may call it added value but the word "added" might sound misleading, since each film is a integer whole rather than factory pieces that add up to make a product), and the furthest away from the sterile exercises in style - a typical attitude, laziness of the mind, not new at all but today more fashionable than ever, of those who are more interested in the appealing of things than in the essence of things - of the majority of the contemporaries, but also, at the same time, his films are fully, magically (not artificial, but good magic, like the miracle that is life) and beautifully rich in sounds, and those sounds are the sounds of people talking from a distance or close, animals, nature, work, any activity that happens to be there, plus an entire, and extremely valuable, world of music, and the resulting mix is completely different from the pompous rhetoric of industrialized cinema, drowned in fanfaristic music and childish redundant special effects, expedients which on the long run end up being meaningless even to the senses.

In Aneel's films, a full and fantastic world of sounds that we, in the western world, we who are spoiled and anaesthetized by regular practice of both exploitation and blablah for 14-16 hours a day, and by the now hyped role of sound design, which often tends to sound so fake (especially in countries like mine which at the moment buys it's contemporary culture 98% from USA and doubles it with reassuring voices which by the way make all the films sound the same), a so called art which I have no fear to call almost perverse... we could - I do - feel a sense of long lost familiarity watching "boy in the tree", even if an eastern culture is so different from mine (again, apparently, since all cultures of the world share the same universal origin)... Still the sound side of the works, as this one, is a quiet force, and seems to be in a very special harmony with the deep, yet humble, feelings that are inherent to the characters and to the story. Aneel is a true poet.

I can see him - why not? - on the same level as the great Italian poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, for its direct, sober way, for the focus on essential, in visual imagery at least (Pasolini would, on the other hand, sometimes reach peaks of craziness, mislanguage and cacophony on purpose, and on this the two artists are diametrically different), with a cinematographic language that is as bony, sort of emaciated perhaps (but not sick at all, furthest away from that). Even a frame picturing the feet of a man sleeping outside in the shade, becomes art, when he makes it. To have a beautifully intense look on life is a gift of this Pakistani and international film director.... This simple short film is like the purest water collected from the highest mountain.