Backup of a Life
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Backup of a Life.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
A room drawn in green light stands over a rough sea, at the edge of a pier. It has the outline of walls and no weight. The lines are thin, the color of a signal, and they do not cast a shadow on the water. One figure waits at the pier's edge, coat dark, hands empty. Rain ticks on a pane that belongs to the light-room, and a lamp inside the pane reflects, though the sea is the wall behind it. The real pier is wet. The planks shine and darken under each wave that reaches the piles. The figure does not step off until the next wave has fallen back.
The figure walks into the room. People are not with him. The lines of the room brighten under his shoes and run out over the tide, a grid that refuses to follow the swell. Furniture finishes itself as he passes. A table completes its top, edge by edge. A chair finishes its legs and stands. A rug arrives as a rectangle of denser lines and stops at a border. A wave crosses the rug and does not darken it. The water shows through the pattern and leaves the pattern alone. Foam breaks where a pile would be and cannot find the rug's fringe. The green grid stays a grid above the water.
He keeps walking. The room lengthens into a corridor of light on the water, wall after wall arriving only as he needs the next length. Rain continues on the pane and does not reach the sea under the floor. Drops bead on the glass of the light and do not fall through. The lamp reflection holds in the glass, steady, while the real sea moves. His coat does not drip onto the rug. The pier behind him gives up his outline and is only planks and rain. A loose rope on the pier taps a pile and keeps tapping, outside the room, uncopied by the light.
He becomes small at the far end of the corridor. The furniture does not follow him all the way. Table, chair, and rug remain where they finished, mid-corridor, occupied by no one. Time passes as the lamp in the pane burns without a flicker the sea could claim. A second chair begins at the table, two legs and a seat edge, and stops there, half made, unwilling to become a place for another person. The half chair does not rock with the waves. The lamp in the pane does not multiply to light it.
The pier behind him is empty. The corridor of light remains standing on the tide, furniture and all, with the lamp still reflected in rain that never lands on the water. The half chair keeps its missing legs. He stays small at the far end, and the rough sea keeps moving under a floor that will not admit it.