How to step into a new kind of Jerusalem without becoming what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way, finding a promised land in each other. Based on an excerpt from the poem Red Sea: April 2002 by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist.

Taking the Labyrinth as main historical inspiration, the film connects mythology to a present socio-political reality in Palestine. Filmed in particular ancient sites in Palestine—caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys—the land becomes our main character. The work traverses beyond the first layer of visibility, and reveals a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know, pointing to what was lost, forgotten, or unsaid. The film expands a sense of historical loss while creating a space for the past to recur; not merely to go back to the facts, but to further open the imaginary gaps. Hazy scenes combine gestures of the ancient world related to goddesses, caves, and offerings, with ritualistic performances of the community and everyday gestures. It emphasizes, therefore, the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

There is a story circulating among Zen Buddhist monks about two types of monks. First ones are settled and spend all their life in a monastery, they are identified with the blue mountains, while others are like white clouds – constantly traveling from one place to another. In the film, the filmmaker and Won Bo Sunim, a Lithuanian woman who decided to go to South Korea more than 20 years ago and become a Zen monk, embark on a journey in the mountains of South Korea.

Nerve Scales is part of a larger multi-decade project, The Omen Project, a serious of multi-media productions surrounding a couple, a man and a woman, mind and heart. Inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey, the hubris of man at war with the world, leaving his family and love behind, becoming lost and fallen through his own fault. This story is transposed to modern times and a mythic view of our own war with the world, with the advent of Nuclear War. These two again separated by hubris, arrogance, and destruction, he wanders looking to regain his love. A love song and tale of woe, told in experimental video, movement, and poetry.

It's about.
Of a man, of a panic, of a fury.
Of a war.
A fright.
But it may be something else