Carlos Casas’s film – half documentary, half experimental essay – is a near-wordless evocation of a ‘celebrity’ Sri Lankan elephant’s confrontation with death
Carlos Casas’s Cemetery arrives on the arthouse streaming service Mubi, a slow sensory film with a magnetic pull of strangeness; it may test the endurance of even Mubi’s hardcore highbrow audience. Somewhere between an experimental art piece and a nature documentary, there’s no story here in the normal sense, and it’s almost entirely wordless. Which is not to say that Cemetery is silent; wildlife audio recordist Chris Watson has put together a wondrously rich sonic landscape of nature sounds.
The setting is Sri Lanka, where an elderly elephant called Nga makes his way to the mythical elephant graveyard. In the first chapter Nga and his human keeper – a mahout – live alongside each other deep in a forest. Casas has said that Nga is a well-known elephant in Sri Lanka, as famous as George Clooney; though surely he’s more of a Bogart – lugubrious and leather-faced.