Cenotes—sources of water that in ancient Mayan civilization were said to connect the real world and the afterlife. The past and present of the people living in and around them intersect, and distant memories echo throughout immersive scenes of light and darkness.
Ts'onot, 沉洞泉, 세노테
Japan
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
USA
Art of the Real
UK
Japan
UK
USA
city folk will never know what it's like to have a powerful all-knowing deity living in a local cenote that will bring you a moment of Complete Peace simply by touching one of its long divine tendrils
"Nothing is forgotten.
Impossible memories.
Are they really ours?"
Like the thousands of particles and refraction of numerous streams of light in the subterranean water, lost bodies, voices, memories, history and stories are forever swimming in the endless echo of the mythical and spiritual cenotes.
"I wanted moments where my perspective as a living person became that of the dead. The sound of the howling monkeys that come in during the film is related to the idea. Also towards the end, there’s a shot where the camera continues to follow these fish in the dark. That shot, I put in consciously with intention.
When I was filming the fish too, I was just thinking "oh, there’s fish." And while they…
Cenote is a film that focuses mainly on the visual and the sound. The film expects a huge artistic imagination from the viewer. As I said to my friend, it could be in a museum of modern art in London or Paris. But for the running time of over an hour, it is just not interesting enough to keep my full attention. Still, it was nice to see what a Cenote looks like under water and for being shot with an iPhone camera, there are some nice images. If you need a moment of zen, this film is highly recommended.
MUBI sucked me back in with the tantalizing offer of 3 months for $1, so I figured I should actually use it this time and got right to it. I had heard of Cenote before, and the topic - ritual Mayan sinkholes - is fascinating. Kaori Oda captures some truly gorgeous shots and sequences in Cenote, but 75 minutes stretched my patience thin. This is a film I'd walk into at a museum and spend 15-20 minutes enraptured by before leisurely walking out. Personally, I feel like I get more out of films like this watching smaller random portions then getting impatient with the whole film. But, hey! I watched a documentary, so that's cool!
Oh my ❤❤❤
The cenote - ts’ono’ot in Mayan - is a natural sinkhole caused by the collapse of limestone bedrock and filled with drinking water. For the Mayans who lived inland and were separated from the traditional water sources, the cenote provided drinking water and thus was a vital part of their communities. They thanked the rain god Chaac rumored to live at the ground of the cenote with human sacrifices. In his book The Sacred And The Profane: The Nature of Religion Mircea Eliade argues for the existence of an axis mundi, a sacred pillar which connects our world with the cosmos. (Think for example Yggdrasil or sacred trees in general.) The cenotes, while very much following Eliade's…
Less a documentary, more a dream-like ascent to another plane of existence. Where myth and history are one and the same. Where bleached, burned-out, scratched visuals shot on super-8 occupy a void space between life, death and rebirth, and echoing whispers, ripped from time itself, guide your journey.
CENOTE is a film of striking, beautiful images, but ultimately one I didn’t really connect with. Oda Kaori investigates past and present and life and death through the perspective of Mayan rituals and beliefs relating to cenotes, natural sinkholes, located in Yucatán.
Remember that scene from the Graduate where he is underwater and it’s a point of view shot?
Well imagine that and with a pinch of Terrance Malick salt and together you have this beautiful film.
Wow it looked gorgeous from start to finish
hello how are you i am under the water please help me
"It is well worth noting that Oda serves as cinematographer, editor, and sound designer on her films, and that goes some way in accounting for the immersiveness of her work despite the purportedly minimal concept. For Cenote is in many ways a maximal film, in its sensory affect and evocation of the at-times otherworldly nature of the sinkholes. At the same time, Oda’s ultimate achievement is to situate them in a real, tangible place, in a conception of culture that still manages to accurately reflect the unique blend of happenstance, tradition, and myth that form human experience. A uniformly, often eerily beautiful film, Cenote understands that the meaning and effect of a place is often immeasurably influenced by the point of view: a camera and light pointed there, a story told there."
I could watch this forever
One of the more astonishing collections of culture, landscapes, and soundscapes. Even with some questionable structural and stylistic decisions, few directors in recent memory have been this kaleidoscopic with their world, not so much in the on-paper content, but in the sensations that cinema allows.
