Co-directed with Leonardo Pirondi

Sound Mixing
Andrew Kim

Supported by
Galeria Mola & CalArts Film/Video Project Grant

Format: 16 mm, color/b&w, 5.1 sound
Length: 11 minutes
Year: 2023
Prod. Countries: Portugal/USA

In 1934, the “Automeris Project,” named after a moth, began: a group of children isolated in a forest learned about the outside world only through indoctrination films made by two amateur scientists with the aim of providing positive impulses represented American achievements in civilization. Pirondi and Ray-Trapido recapitulate the traces of the project and reconstruct one of these idiosyncratic educational films based on surviving recordings. However, this may not be the whole truth... — Bernd Brehmer

“In 1934, an amateur scientist couple carried out an experiment on what constitutes utopia, whereby children were left alone in a forest with no external input. Periodically, the couple visited to show them artisanal, non-narrative films of their own making, seeking to transform the children’s vision. WHEN WE ENCOUNTER THE WORLD repurposes the term “experimental” in responding to the traces of this scientific investigation. Research logs and abandoned child-like structures amid lush landscapes pave the way to an ecstatic ending of associative images that are based on scientists’ filmmaking notes.” — Salvador Amores

A quick search for the Automeris moth — the name used by the two amateur scientists in the film to refer to their experiment on a colony of children isolated from the real world — will reveal a creature displaying the pattern of what looks like eyes, each wing mirroring each other. When We Encounter the World is as much about the folly of knowledge and the bizarre couple’s utopian dreams as it is about the act of seeing and the idea of image as mediator: not always a true mediator, not always an innocent one. Leonardo Pirondi and Zazie Ray-Trapido’s montage of (uncertain) archival  footage and newer images blends into itself, mixing the real with the fictional and creating an unexpected take on the Platonic allegory of the cave. With the duo replicating the same process as the scientists, that is, now depicting the world to us, the question arises: are we on the outside or are we inside the cave? — Dora Leu

“A managed colony of children are brought up in isolation from the modernising world of the 1930s, their only experience of it mediated by a diet of experimental montage film. Archival footage mixes with reconstructions of these impressionistic city symphonies, created to study the effects on their social psyche. If immediately afterwards you are seized with curiosity to learn more, you’ll find the internet no help: no accessible record of the so-called Automeris project exists. With When We Encounter The World, Leonardo Pirondi continues his exploration of the nature of reality and perception this time alongside co-director Zazie-Ray Trapido, whose unreliable narration channels the voice of scientific authority. It conjures something akin to a speculative documentary, a generic decision that further unsettles our sense of real and unreal. Even the name of the purported project, Automeris, comes from a species of moth distinctive for the eye-mimicking pattern of its wings. It suggests a hall-of-mirrors where we can be just as deceived by the eyes of the other as much as our own. But for all its social and metaphysical concerns, the film confidently evades dryness. Its hyper-Eisensteinian conceit is executed with a heavy dose of hauntological humour, and lush visuals which glow with obvious affection for the cinematic language it inherits.” — Oisín Kealy