- Documentary – 95 min. – South Africa 2023
- With: Strijdom van der Merwe
- Director: Victor van Aswegen
- Production: Mike Spittal, Victor van Aswegen, Strijdom van der Merwe
- Language: English – 18 years and older
Screening times
- 28.01. – 11:00 am – Astra – Buy ticket
- 01.02. – 5:00 pm – Sabu – Buy ticket
Synopsis
Sculpting This Earth follows internationally acclaimed artist Strijdom van der Merwe over four consecutive seasons as he travels to remote locations in the southern African interior to make beautiful land art works in a striking range of spectacular natural settings. Featuring 25 fleeting artworks, the film shows the artist at work in the landscape and sharing his thoughts as he finds his canvases in nature – in verdant valleys and forests, on the shore of a lagoon, in the vast expanses of the arid semi-desert. Shot over more than a year, from December 2020 to April 2022, the new film from award-winning director Victor van Aswegen is the world’s first feature documentary about land art from the southern hemisphere. With stunning cinematography and an extraordinary soundtrack including 11 pieces of music composed for the film, Sculpting This Earth is a meditative and moving reflection on life and transience.
About the director
Sculpting This Earth director Victor van Aswegen is a Cape Town-based filmmaker with a background in, successively, law, economics, development, finance, private equity, consultancy, and business analytics. As filmmaker and founder-owner of CineSouth Studios, he now works principally as director and producer. His work to date has dealt with the nature of complex systems, the traumatic experience of people forcibly displaced by conflict and persecution, the parallel arcs of urbanisation and the human life cycle from childhood to parenthood, and an urban resilience stress event in the form of the 2017–2018 Cape Town water crisis. Before Sculpting This Earth (2023), he made two other films about artists and their work: Máquina do Mundo (2017), a conversation with Paris-based artist Katja Gentric, and Displaced (2020), a retrospective of the oeuvre of South African artist Emma Willemse that has garnered acclaim on the global film festival circuit, with laurels from more than sixty festivals on five continents to date.
