{"id":24863,"date":"2020-11-17T22:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-11-17T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2020\/nov\/17\/cemetery-review-sri-lanka-elephants-graveyard-experimental-documentary"},"modified":"2020-11-17T22:00:13","modified_gmt":"2020-11-17T13:00:13","slug":"cemetery-review-elephant-heads-for-the-graveyard-in-hardcore-art-piece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=24863","title":{"rendered":"Cemetery review \u2013 elephant heads for the graveyard in hardcore art piece"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Carlos Casas\u2019s film \u2013 half documentary, half experimental essay \u2013 is a near-wordless evocation of a \u2018celebrity\u2019 Sri Lankan elephant\u2019s confrontation with death<\/p>\n<p>Carlos Casas\u2019s Cemetery arrives on the arthouse streaming service Mubi, a slow sensory film with a magnetic pull of strangeness; it may test the endurance of even Mubi\u2019s hardcore highbrow audience. Somewhere between an experimental art piece and a nature documentary, there\u2019s no story here in the normal sense, and it\u2019s almost entirely wordless. Which is not to say that Cemetery is silent; wildlife audio recordist <a href=\"https:\/\/chriswatson.net\/\">Chris Watson<\/a> has put together a wondrously rich sonic landscape of nature sounds.<\/p>\n<p>The setting is Sri Lanka, where an elderly elephant called Nga makes his way to the mythical elephant graveyard. In the first chapter Nga and his human keeper \u2013 a mahout \u2013 live alongside each other deep in a forest. Casas has said that Nga is a well-known elephant in Sri Lanka, as famous as George Clooney; though surely he\u2019s more of a Bogart \u2013 lugubrious and leather-faced.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2020\/nov\/17\/cemetery-review-sri-lanka-elephants-graveyard-experimental-documentary\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carlos Casas\u2019s film \u2013 half documentary, half experimental essay \u2013 is a near-wordless evocation of a \u2018celebrity\u2019 Sri Lankan elephant\u2019s confrontation with deathCarlos Casas\u2019s Cemetery arrives on the arthouse streaming service Mubi, a slow sensory film wi&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":603,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[71,707,508,69,61,674,94,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-documentary-films","category-drama-films","category-film","category-south-and-central-asia","category-sri-lanka","category-wildlife","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/603"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24864,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24863\/revisions\/24864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}