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Cemetery follows the path of Nga, a Sri Lankan elephant who begins a journey to the sacred elephant cemetery, as planet Earth collapses at the hand of natural catastrophes. In a slow-motion adventure, nature ceases to be the backdrop of human life, and becomes the sensitive, thinking entity that communicates through the sound and visual matter of the film. The radio reports that a violent earthquake has devastated Asia, killing thousands of people. From here, the film begins a three-part journey towards a cosmological understanding of space after the calamity and the consequent extinction of species. Finding the elephant cemetery, plunging into darkness, means starting a kind of rebirth. Themes such as death, reincarnation, immortality are addressed, but also memory, colonialism and the collapse of civilization.
Cemetery is an odyssey about the unknown, the unexplored, this elephant cemetery – perhaps a kind of shangri la. (Inês Lima Torres)
