International Satan's Day

A silent film showing images of nature following a seemingly innocent gaze. However, at a certain moment, subtitles appear to narrate a much more tragic and contrasting narrative: the artist’s own poetry about experiencing hell in the living world. This very personal and painful perspective highlights an anguished interiority that can only be conveyed without sound. The unusual natural imagery coupled with this grievous text was shot in an area in Japan named The Seven Hells where volcanic hot springs gush from the ground creating a surreal environment.

The camera scans a landscape of bubbling, smoking pools of sulphur as if the gates of hell had opened underground. In a poem told through subtitles, the tragic narrator initiates us into his situation, like a mythological (anti)hero who has woken up to a really bad day. Raed Yassin’s ‘International Satan’s Day’ is a film that, with diabolical humor and sincere melancholy, gives new meaning to nature’s romantic motifs: ‘I fall broken like hope / and remain as such / a king of remorse and prince of wisdom’. From CPH:DOX page