In many of your films, the characters are pursuing something that always seems just out of reach—a letter, a recording, a family memory, a forgotten history. In Pure Reason, however, the search turns towards something as intangible as light and colour. Do you see this film as a natural extension of your fascination with pursuing the elusive?
Looking back, I realize that my films have never really been about finding something. They’re about what happens to us when we’re actively searching.
In my earlier work, that search often took the form of letters, recordings, family histories, or forgotten people. Those were tangible objects, but they always pointed toward something that couldn’t be fully recovered. There was always a gap between the archive and lived experience.
With Pure Reason, I think I stripped that impulse down to its essence. Instead of searching for a person or a memory, I began to resurrect colour. Every morning I chose a single colour from one of Jaan Poldaas’ paint-stained canvas strips, extracted its hexadecimal value, and walked through Paris until that colour seemed to reveal itself in the city through an object which I would then purchase. The journey became less about finding an object than about transforming my own attention.
While I was making the film, I found myself returning to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a text that Daniel Baird, Jaan Poldaas’ gallerist at Birch Contemporary in Toronto, also invokes in his writing on Jaan’s work. One of Kant’s central ideas is that we never perceive the world as it exists “in itself.” Our minds actively organize experience before we are even aware of it. That idea resonated deeply with the project. The film became an attempt to ask not, “What am I looking at?” but, “How does perception or the act of looking become possible?”
In that sense, Pure Reason isn’t a departure from my earlier films. It’s perhaps the clearest expression of a few questions I’ve been asking myself for many years: How do we learn to see? And how do we make the invisible process of perception visible?
In Pure Reason, you work with expired 16mm film and handmade processing techniques. In an era dominated by digital images, what does celluloid still offer you that other tools cannot?
Digital images tend to promise precision and stability. Celluloid resists both. Every roll carries its own history, blemishes and flaws. The expired stock reacts differently to light, the chemistry leaves traces of its own, and every hand-processing session introduces small variations that cannot be completely controlled.
That unpredictability became central to Pure Reason. Throughout the film, I was working with colours that had been defined with extraordinary precision. I sampled them digitally from Jaan Poldaas’ paintings using Photoshop’s eyedropper tool and recorded their hexadecimal values. On paper, those colours were fixed. But the moment they entered the world—projected onto a white wall at sunset, recorded on expired film, developed by hand—they began to change.
That transformation interested me far more than accuracy.
The material itself became part of the experiment. Rather than documenting colour, the film reveals how colour is continually shaped by light, chemistry, time, and the body that captures it. Celluloid reminds us that perception is never perfectly objective. It is always embodied, imperfect, and alive.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Pure Reason is the way the soundtrack seems to approach colour as something that can almost be heard. How did you and your collaborators develop a sonic language capable of translating visual sensations into sound?
From the very beginning, I didn’t want the music to accompany the images. I wanted it to participate in the same perceptual experiment.
I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with composer Stefana Fratila across several films, and she immediately understood that this score needed to exist as another layer of perception rather than illustration. Together with sound mixer Lucas Prokaziuk, who crafted the film’s 5.1 soundscape, we approached sound as something spatial, tactile, and constantly evolving. Beneath the score, the audience can also hear fragments of our daily routines—the footsteps, conversations, and small gestures that accompanied the making of the film. My friend Dorota, whose beautiful hands generously held each object I discovered in Paris in front of the camera every evening or morning, became an essential part of that quiet rhythm. Those sounds remain in the film as traces of the process itself.
I’ve always been fascinated by Wassily Kandinsky’s writings on colour and synesthesia. He imagined colour as something that could resonate like music—that a deep blue might possess the emotional weight of an organ, or that yellow might burst forward like a trumpet. Whether or not synesthesia exists in a neurological sense wasn’t what interested me. What fascinated me was the possibility that colour and sound might inhabit the same perceptual space. Stefana did a wonderful job of bringing those ideas and concepts to life and Lucas gave it all dimension in the mix.
Rather than composing music that explained the images, Stefana created a score that seems to breathe alongside them. It doesn’t tell the audience what to feel; instead, it opens another sensory pathway into the experience of colour.
That dialogue between image and sound became especially important because the film isn’t really about colour as an object. It’s about colour as an event or a living organism—something that unfolds and evolves over time. Just as the projected colours slowly emerge as daylight fades, the music evolves almost imperceptibly, encouraging the viewer to inhabit a slower, more attentive way of looking.
Pure Reason was shot during the COVID lockdowns, yet audiences are encountering it several years later. How has the passage of time changed your relationship to the images, emotions, and ideas captured in the film? Do you see it differently now than you might have if it had been released immediately after it was made?
Very much so.
When I made the film, it was an intensely private experience. Paris was unusually quiet, and the daily walks became a way of giving structure to time. The protocol was simple—choose a colour, walk, wait for dusk, project, observe, take notes—but it became almost meditative. I don’t think I fully understood what I was making while I was making it.
Seeing the film now, several years later, I realize it was teaching me how to slow down, how to pay attention.
At the time, I probably thought I was making a film about Jaan Poldaas. Now I think the film is equally about perception itself. It asks what happens when we let the world reveal itself, rather than rushing to interpret it.
The years have also allowed me to recognize philosophical connections that I wasn’t consciously pursuing at the time. I’m not a philosopher, they’re hard for me to explain. Reading a bit of Kant later gave language to questions that had already been present in the filmmaking. Likewise, returning to Kandinsky or Chris Marker, I can now see that they share a belief that cinema and painting can reshape the way we experience the world, not by offering answers, but by altering our attention.
In that sense, the delay to release this film has been a gift. The film hasn’t changed, but my understanding of it has. I now see Pure Reason less as a finished work than as a record of learning how to perceive.
Interviewed by Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria
