Counting

COUNTING is Jem Cohen’s most palpably personal and affecting film. Made “very privately as a homage to Chris Marker”, the cult director with whom he corresponded for ten years, it’s a voiceless and gorgeously photographed drift through cities as various as Moscow, Istanbul and Sharjah. These travelogues are intercut with footage of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in New York, mysteriously funny images of a bin-liner inflating in a wintry gust, and glimpses of his elderly mother, who had a stroke a number of years ago.
COUNTING, like all of Cohen’s work, glows with bruised lyricism. It feels like a temporary shelter in the face of an imminent storm. “So much is disappearing, but we can’t live in a constant state of defeat and mourning. I want to demonstrate that, in spite of all our problems, the world is extraordinary and fascinating and beautiful.” (Sukhdev Sandhu)

In the prescence of Jem Cohen.