Minou Norouzi

Carlos Castaneda, sixties author and ‘celebrated godfather of New Age’ died in his Los Angeles home in 1998. Five women forming his ‘harem’ disappeared within days. In 2004, bones are found at the edge of Death Valley belonging to one of the disappeared women. In a series of Californian road trips, filmmaker Minou Norouzi reflects on what the women’s obsession with Castaneda may have been and begins to wonder if her own life isn’t mirroring theirs. She meets a concoction of Castaneda associates who are all invested in telling her about Castaneda, whilst the story of the women remains in shadow.

A work of speculative cinematic writing, the film is about war and displacement, architecture and place-making. It tells the fragmented biography of the so-called Rock Church, an iconic building in Helsinki and its architects who were excluded from the canon of Finnish modernism. The architects' personal history of displacement due to the Finnish Winter War of 1939 and Soviet occupation is braided with the war on present-day Gaza. Past and present histories, temporalities and geographies fold into, and over one another collapsing time, place and identities narratively to consider, in the gentlest of tones, the impact of atrocities on contemporary lifeworlds.