Spinning Sense - A cinematic short film cycle

Spinning Sense is a cinematic short film cycle that explores spiritual, ritual, and performative practices. Each episode tells a standalone story with new protagonists in changing locations, captured by a camera that spins inexorably around its own axis. This continuous movement breaks with classic narrative patterns and opens up a cinematic field beyond linear narration.
The short films are created in close collaboration with artists, choreographers, and performers whose practice is based on ritual and embodied forms of knowledge. The focus is not on pure documentation, but on the medium of film as a performative space that combines critical reflection with transformative experience. In this way, each episode becomes an independent cinematic practice in its own right.
Spinning Sense oscillates between contemplative silence and intense physicality. Between performative ritual, documentary observation, and visual imagination, the episodes explore behind the surface of everyday life and open up spaces for sensory expansion, presence, and the dissolution of the ego. 

1. The Prologue (10:33)
When the ego dies, something else begins to breathe. A force strikes the skull. Between pain and silence, transformation unfolds.

2. Shifting between Shapes (8:14)
A breathing body becomes a hybrid creature, part predator, part bird, part warrior. It dares the impossible: to escape the sky and fly towards the sun like Icarus.

3. Mirror of Stillness (7:49)
In the middle of the desert, silence calls for passivity. Body and mind rest while earth and sky are reflected in a state of pure perception.

4. Seeing, being seen (8:45)
In the stillness of the images, two perspectives open up. With glittering faces and mantra-like repeated words, they unfold a new perception of seeing and being seen.

5. Recalling memories (14:27)
On a warm summer night, a gentle voice guides you through a meditative breathing journey. With blackbird song and distant city sounds providing the backdrop, attention is focused on the body and memory. An intimate, almost hypnotic journey inward, while the world outside quietly continues.

6. Pulse of Rumination (13:55)
In the seclusion of the mountains, a silent ritual unfolds in which bodies, gazes and myths merge into a ritual cycle between introspection, inner trust and the slow dissolution of an impossible love.

7. Echo of Fears (7:17)
In a dark, cobweb-covered basement, a haunting choreography of pain, anger and longing unfolds. Between roaring echoes and rhythmic tap dancing, colonial shadows and fears for fragile lives are reflected.

8. Ceremony of Entanglements (8:59)
A ritual falls out of balance: tensions, loss of authority, and growing disagreements lead to the director’s exclusion from the community.

9. Silent Renewal (6:38)
In a hidden forest clearing, bathed in soft light, damp clay is shaped into balls and gently placed on a resting body in clear water. In the silent connection between earth, water and skin, a ritual act of purification and renewal takes place.

10. Rhythm of Return (8:28)
In the blue twilight, on the shore of a quiet lake, flickering fire rises from the water. Behind it stands the abandoned bathhouse, a silent witness to a lost community. With clattering wooden slats, a dance begins, a first, hesitant step back into the world before the darkness of the night forest swallows everything. 

The individual episodes can also be shown independently of each other.