The Dusk Chorus - Based on “Fragments of Extinction”

Dusk Chorus is a film on sound, the sound of the ecosystem recorded in the primary equatorial forest with the highest biodiversity on the planet. It enacts a unique perceptual experience in which listeners find themselves instantly immersed in a universe of natural sounds in which images are not dominant. The screen thus becomes a head-on visual mirror that opens onto a habitat with wraparound sound that recreates the original perspective depth. The whole surround 5.1 soundtrack was created with in situ recordings made using 3D eco-acoustic research methodologies to study and capture the soundscape of ecosystems. The idea for a film on the long-term Fragments of Extinction project came into being when these two outstanding young directors, Alex d’Emilia and Nika Šaravanja, asked if they could accompany me on the recording campaign in the Yasunì forest in Ecuador in February 2016. Back in Italy, after seeing the excellent footage from the first edit, I decided to make Dusk Chorus, the filmic interface for this stage in the project, inserting into the narration key concepts for understanding its interdisciplinary aspects, better sound recordings and spectrographic analyses. I thought that the construction of the semantic development of the film should use different intersecting narrative elements: the scientific one of eco-acoustic analysis, the immersive one of three-dimensional sound, the emotive one of the account of the experience in the field, and the social one of the exposure of environmental crimes.

The film is a poetic, audio and visual experience of a remote place where complexity and balance are the fruit of millions of years of the undisturbed co-evolution of a very high number of species threatened today by deforestation, poaching, oil drilling and climate change. (David Monacchi)