This film is part of the exhibition Shoreline Movements, a program of non-fiction films curated by Erika Balsom and Grégory Castéra (Council), in a space designed by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, for the Taipei Biennial 2020.

At Land’s break with linear time is announced from the very beginning, when Maya Deren’s visionary protagonist emerges from the sea. She lays supine on its threshold as the waves strangely withdraw into themselves – a filmic trick of reverse motion. Deren was critical of what she termed the “horizontal time” of conventional narrative cinema, arguing instead for a poetic, vertical time that moves neither forward nor backward, but which condenses fragmentary affective states and associations. In At Land, space and time are freed from pre-given coordinates, as the liminal space of the beach grounds a drifting exploration of the vagaries of psychic life. Events are reshuffled according to an oneiric logic that draws no boundary between subjective states and objective reality. ¹