Jan Villa

Jan Villa is a short film which was directed in 2010 by Natasha Mendonca. It was featured at The International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2011 where it wont the Tiger Award. It also won the Ken Burns award for the Best of the festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival 2011. It was produced as her final thesis project at the California Institute of the Arts.

This short film is about the sense of family and what home is as it occurs after the 2005 flood of Bombay. It is about decay and neglect, and what those concepts can do to both people and place. During the opening scene there is a mangrove forest, at first black and white and clean, then after in color its leaves have turned to paper bags as the flood has whisked the trash of humanity into a place it was not meant to go. This is how the neglect of human-made objects and where they up causes secondary environmental problems over the initial flooding. As for people, there is a part where couple is fighting and as they are, the sound is that of bones snapping, cringe worthy sounds full of pain. This is how neglect can break a person’s emotions just as harshly as physical abuse. It also represents how ever scar etched into the canvas of a body holds a fragment of memory and the relationships (with people or objects) that had shaped that person. Bodies are like architecture and show the wear of abuse the same way flood-lines scar the side of a house.

As for the composition there are two things of note. The first being how color plays into this short film. The black and white shots are meant to invoke a more nostalgic, emotional past whereas the color shots are meant to be the abrasiveness of the present. The second point focuses on the sound. The sound here is very odd as it has a relation to the visuals, but is not actually in sync with them. The sound is meant as a juxtaposition in order to see beyond the visuals into the films meaning.

Natasha Mendonca has actually visited with us when we watched this film. She said a very observant thing about sound and visuals that has to do with this juxtaposition, which is that “the eyes see, but the ear imagines”. This is the kind of concept that old radio audio plays worked off of, you never had to write out a whole distribution as the ambient sound and nuggets of descriptions in the dialogue was enough to outline the idea, the mind could fill in the rest. As such the sound is more of an audio manifestation of Soviet montage theory, or dialectic montage style in that these. Basing the piece’s composition around the rhythm and tone of the sound which help to create a stronger intellectual message for mediation.