This programme presents Nina Danino’s first feature film Temenos, which explores the phenomenon of visionary experience by taking the viewer to locations where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared; here Danino films the landscapes that have witnessed these transcendental appearances, imbuing them with a sense of the sacred. Preceded by the recent short Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara – a photographic portrait in response to the idea of simplicity and poverty, which is the guiding principle of the Poor Clares and their "hidden" life.

Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara
Nina Danino
2016 | 12 min | B/W | 16mm

A photographic portrait in response to the idea of simplicity and poverty which is the guiding principle of the Poor Clares and their "hidden" life. Filmed in the enclosed Monastero di Santa Chiara, San Marino. The nuns spend the morning in the "laboratorio" sewing, mending, ironing, in the kitchen preparing the midday meal and in the garden, tending to the animals and cultivation.
 
Temenos
Nina Danino
1998 | 75 min | Colour & B/W | Beta SP

Temenos means "ritual precinct", a sacred place, a place apart. Filmed in places in Europe where the Virgin is said to have appeared or still be appearing. "a searingly beautiful invocation of the persistence of place that has the power to inscribe contemporary political and social circumstances with the memory of the past. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Rosellini’s Stromboli and Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. Temenos is a haunted territory of unmapped histories and emotions. A fierce place that can be as gentle and devastating as a whisper." – Helen de Witt