Sleep Furiously

Influenced by the writing of Peter Handke (best known for his association with Wim Wenders) and with a Chomsky-nodding title, Sleep Furiously filmmaker Gideon Koppel leads us on a poetic, profound and contemplative journey into a world of endings and beginnings.

Refuting categorisation as a documentary in the traditional sense (though the director is an admirer of Humphrey Jennings), Koppel instead describes his film as an evocation of a time and place in which sparks of intimacy, human interaction and incident are juxtaposed with the bucolic external landscape.

Set in a small farming community in mid Wales, about 50 miles north of Dylan Thomas’ fictional village of Llareggub, is a place where the director’s parents – both refugees and artists – found a home and made a life. Trefeurig is a landscape and population that’s changing rapidly as small-scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Koppel very quietly and skilfully observes this change as the population grows older, the local primary school faces closure, and the mobile library (The Library Van was the original title) resists a move into the twenty-first century.

Acting as his own cinematographer, Koppel allows Sleep Furiously to unfold in long, static and resolutely unhurried takes, treating the camera as, in his own words, “a microscope through which I can explore the world”. There are shots here that are as beautiful as anything in recent cinema (Reygadas’ Silent Light is an apt visual reference), and it’s this distinctive aesthetic that captures the passage from nature to culture and the rhythm and ritual of the world Koppel portrays.

Despite Trefeurig being the source of Koppel’s childhood, there isn’t an ounce of nostalgia or sentiment here, but merely a reflection of the unavoidable march of progress and the often-contradictory circularity of life.

With a soundtrack boasting compositions by Aphex Twin, what we hear in Sleep Furiously is almost as important as what we see. Koppel trained for three years as a sound recording engineer and has developed a fascination with the juxtaposition of sound and image. Using the microphone not merely to illustrate the image, Koppel instead added another dimension in the post-production process, asking the audience to listen to the silence as well as observe the stillness of the camera. Highly recommended.

Jason Wood

Anticipation:

Much admired at festivals but still an unknown quantity.

Enjoyment:

Unusual, haunting and beautiful.

In Retrospect:

A film that exerts a hypnotic hold. Quite unlike anything else you’ll see this year.