With “Ants and Cicadas” I take on again, one decade later, a genre from my days of youth: travel diaries, which I had delved into through short documentaries like “Sankari” (Finland 2004) and Durum (various Mediterranean countries,2006). It is an exercise consisting in observing the outer world but also one’s inner self at a particular point in time and space. The filmed material is the response to an impulse, not to a story with a plot, in which the conflict, if at all, unfolds between the subject captured by the camera and the viewers themselves.
A close look into daily routine can be a healthy and thoughtful means to approach another tempo that makes us confront our own contradictions or introduces us to other ways of living. That is what “Ants and Cicadas” is partly about, or intends to be: a friendly voyage to homo sapiens in the 21st century.