Landscape with sick child

A film-poem made after Gerald Murnane’s short story ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’ (1985), about the aftermath of a failed Paraguayan socialist colony, New Australia, founded in 1912. Murnane’s unnamed narrator, a displaced Australian descendent living in Paraguay, is beset by his son’s dire physical illness. His concern for his son’s life is matched only by his own mental fixation to communicate the secret meaning of his true homeland; a place which he can never fully return to. Landscape with sick child searches for a different set of audiovisual signs, streaming a psychogeographic illness through overlapping passages of disparate sounds and images, setting landscape with landscape.

• Matthew BerkaDirector