Rita Macedo

Implausible Things

Films • 28′ 43″ • sound (ST) • EN + FR w/ EN subtitles • 2014

“Implausible Things” is a laboratory of cinematic devices composed entirely from found 16mm footage. Structured in seven sequences, each with its own formal logic, the piece continually shifts its narration structure, rhythm, and visual syntax. What begins with the discovery of a box of archival reels becomes a series of compositional exercises in rearrangement, mistranslation and reinscription, in which images loop, stutter and resist continuity. The film unfolds as a cinematic mise-en-abîme, reflecting on its own operations through its making, its mediation and its capacity to both generate and undo meaning. Despite its fragmentation, the work holds a subtle coherence through recurring tonal hooks and the shared grain of its material — a circular logic of form that performs the instability it depicts.

Together, the seven sequences form a less-than-linear architecture in which viewers must repeatedly adapt to new visual and sonic grammars. The film does not seek integrity through narrative, but through modulation — in tone, in pacing, and in the material consistency of the found 16mm footage that anchors the whole.

The project began with the accidental encounter with a box of 16mm reels. Rather than treating this archive as a site of restoration or retrieval, the film engages it as raw material: an open structure for reconfiguration. The footage is neither explained nor stabilized. It is recut, interrupted, re-sonified — a surface for testing how cinema might operate once continuity, causality, and identification are treated not as foundations, but variables.

Text in the film performs multiple roles: at times it appears as voiceover, at times as subtitle or intertitle, and often hovers in tension with what is seen or heard. Its tone shifts between dry instruction, dialogue and reflective musing, amplifying the sense that meaning in the work is always provisional. Voice is never singular, and perspective is never fixed.

“Implausible Things” does not present a theory of cinema, but works through cinema, testing its logics from within. It draws affinity with media archaeology not in the sense of tracing histories, but in treating film as an operative field: one where devices and formats are generative rather than nostalgic. The work embraces the materiality and friction of found media, not to restore its past, but to rewire its potential. It disassembles itself even as it loops back into a strange kind of unity.

New Talent Award
11th IndieLisboa International Film Festival (2014)

It all starts with a box filled with films. As if the meaning of things had been lost, a path of possibilities, that lean on randomness, appears. An extraordinary mise en abyme fills 7 chapters using found footage in a stimulating narrative and sonorous construction. The plurality of sensory memory, as a roll of film that unfolds, resonates in this exploration of the world, mankind, space and time.
— Carlota Gonçalves, IndieLisboa International Film Festival

Written, directed and edited by Rita Macedo • Original soundtrack by Yair Elazar Glotman, Pedro Augusto (Ghuna X), Nigel Farrelly,
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Rita Macedo • With the voices of Nigel Farrelly, Annie Goh, Jean-Philippe Villemaire-Quintin • Sound design Rita Macedo, Yair Elazar Glotman