'Soleman' / Sarah Palmieri
Filmmaker Sarah Palmieri paints a view of companionship amongst solitude in her 30-minute documentary set in Mt. Everest Soleman
Narrm based filmmaker Sarah Palmieri has trekked solo across 825 kilometres of desert terrain on the Camino de Santiago, ridden Vespas down the Amalfi Coast with handsome Italian strangers, moseyed up and down the Australian east coast, and has been known to ditch return flights last minute to go where her curiosity takes her. Where adventure can be found, so too can Sarah. After a trip to Everest with her father, Carlo, and sister, Lauren, in 2020, Sarah returned home to a coronavirus-stricken Melbourne. No more gargantuan masses of rock and snow. Just four white walls and nothing but time; hours that rolled into days, weeks, months.
An instinctive filmmaker, Sarah created Soleman, a thirty-minute documentary tracing the journey from village to base camp, coloured with poignancy and playfulness, cutting and pasting fragments of the trip – wide, still frames of stark white crags, close ups of strangers turned pals and hand-held videography pick us up and drop us in the pocket of the adventure, jostle us through towns, sweep us up the mountainside and allow us to peer into the balaclava-clad faces of Everest explorers.
“Making the film gave me the space to reflect with gratitude and to ponder new direction. It gave me a sense of peace, the repetitiveness of editing near serving as meditation. It gave me a connection to people in a time that was otherwise very lonely.”
Throughout the collage of awe-inspiring visuals and thoughtful sound -- including the meandering, delicate piano score composed by Narrm’s Arlon Faria -- we never catch more than a glimpse of Sarah, but we come to know her through her off-the-cuff interviews with her fellow travellers. Under the spotlight is Carlo, and his responses squeeze the heart with candour, humour and nonchalant profundity.
Soleman is intimate and vast, exhilarating and calming, familiar and otherworldly, all at once. It offers itself to the spectator as an opportunity to slow down, observe, contemplate, appreciate the beauty of humans amongst the natural world.
The experience of Soleman is a contemplative, soulful homage to human spirit; the desire to connect to the world and those around us, the quest for adventure, the joy in struggle, the wisdom within all of us.
As I write this, I’m afflicted by what I call the ‘Lockdown Yearning’ (Melbournites, you know the feeling). I have naught but time to think. I want to explore, to be an ‘exploretor’ (as Sarah calls it). It’s day 11 of lockdown and I want to focus on something other than my own head. I want something to feel good, something to remind me of the great unknown, something to feed my soul. I might just watch Soleman ;)
Watch Soleman below:
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Article by Ella Ferris https://www.instagram.com/(@fellafellaf)
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