oah_harlam_03

One of my greatest pleasures (or should that be time sinks?) is stumbling over a film on Vimeo, then digging into the filmmaker’s archives to get a comprehensive view of their body of work – if I ever make the mistake of travelling down the path of their ‘Likes’ too, I’m always sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs or yarn, otherwise you’ll read about my desiccated corpse being found collapsed on my laptop months later, but I digress.

What I meant to say, was that after watching Of Shepherds, part 1 of Ruah Edelstein’s animated series of Oah & Harlam Episodes, I was compelled to watch parts 2 & 3, ForGiveness and Of Giants (along with all her other videos). The Oah & Harlam Episodes present a world of muted colours inhabited by the dual, but opposite, weirdos Oah and Harlam, with overlapping male and female narration and a minimal score from Yoon S. Lee. The ultimate effect of which leaves you in a state of questioning calm.

These stories are not just shorts that I wrote, they are a worldview, answers to some questions of reality, grotesque simplicity of which seems to be surreal. In this project bits of life situations, thoughts, and actions are applied to animation, music, and a spoken word. There is a need to write fairytales for grownups, to write almost impossible stories, because when we seriously begin to talk about important and intimate things in live, most of us cannot take it.

Oah & Harlam Episodes is an ongoing series with Edelstein currently hard at work on the next three installments.

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