Man of Aral

Man of Aral is an experimental film created from satellite images of the disappearing Sea of Aral in Central Asia, showing the gradual decrease in water levels and the drastic transformation of the landscape as a result of human activity.
A digital time lapse sequence was created from these images, transferred onto 16mm film, and chemically manipulated by hand with colour tints and toners, which affected the images visually and materially, creating a unique—both digital and analog, both mechanically and manually composed—hybrid visual object. The soundtrack by Nicolas Clair was inspired by the original score composed by John D. H. Greenwood for Man of Aran in 1934.
As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the landscape and of the film material itself as competing human and geological timelines through distant views of a rapidly yet almost invisibly changing territory, a key event of unprecedented scale.