Thank you Lili White for exposing me to Toxic Park, the great work of Cinzia Sarto & Emita Frigato. Toxic Park incarnates a visual storytelling landscape that defines how we are now meant to face technology and an experimental narrative genre. I have had a difficult time, as a film artist, surrendering my purist romance to celluloid and accepting the inevitable extinction of film. Toxic Park gave me hope. I was taken by the extremity of visual abstractions and the appropriation of the main character’s interpretation of this amusement park with sound and pictures.
I was constantly debating if the park was truly alive, or if this young girl desperately made the park only her’s to keep. This film (not video, which is a dirty word to me) sympathizes with the experience of true wonder in the world of amusement parks and the memories that we hold onto after such an experience touches us. Toxic Park reminded me of the important work of Olivier Assayas (Demonlover) and Lilliana Caviani (The Night Porter) and how what we see is usually what we get.
What I see in Toxic Park is a trance state and a cinematic drug that is mandating a healthy intoxication to all of those desperately trying to survive in this rapidly moving world of gadgets and renovation. I did not need a battery or electrical plug to think about what I felt about this film, so I know for a fact that the human part of how we see and absorb contemporary cinema has real hope. And, so do amusement parks. Thank Gawd Almighty.
– Joey Huertas (aka Jane Public)
