The Buried Colossus
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is The Buried Colossus.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
A crowned stone head and the upper torso of a buried figure rise out of the dunes at the end of the day. Sand leaves the great mouth in a slow sheet. The eyes hold the sunset and do not dull. A traveler stands at the edge of the nearest dune, cloak heavy and pale with dust, and does not climb the stone. The crown on the head is missing a piece. The gap is dark. Sand grains tick down the carved cheek and do not stick to the eyes. The sunset in those eyes is steady, as if the stone were keeping the hour on purpose.
The traveler waits at the crest. Wind moves the cloak and moves the sand on the slope and does not move the head. A fragment of the stone crown lies half buried by the traveler's boots, sand packed hard into its cracks. Minutes pass as the sheet of sand from the mouth thinning and thickening, and as the light in the eyes staying gold while the sky around it begins to give the gold up. The traveler does not speak to the mouth. The mouth does not yet open further.
The traveler lifts the fragment clear. Sand spills from its cracks and from the hole it leaves. The great mouth opens a fraction more, as though a word is next. Dust slides out in the shape of a breath and scatters on the slope, short of any word. The shoulders shift under the dune. A fresh run of sand starts down the carved chest. The eyes do not give up the light they are holding. In the traveler's hands the fragment's cracks take new sand from the wind and pack it harder than the dune had packed it. The fragment grows heavier by that packing. The mouth gives one smaller breath of dust after the first and then only a trickle.
The traveler steps back to the crest with the fragment in both hands. The mouth goes on shedding dust in that almost-breath. The dune settles around the buried shoulders, and the stone eyes keep the last of the sun. The trickle thins to grains. The shoulders do not rise again. The fragment stays out of the crown, packed and heavy, and the gap on the head stays empty of it.
The stone eyes hold the last gold after the slope has gone grey. Dust still leaves the mouth. The traveler remains on the crest, and the buried shoulders stay where the dune put them back.
The sky above the dunes loses the gold the stone eyes are still keeping. Sand ticks on the traveler's cloak and on the fragment and does not build the fragment back into a crown. The great mouth's trickle becomes single grains with long pauses between them. The pauses lengthen. A shoulder under the dune gives no second shift. The traveler's fingers stay locked around the packed stone. She does not offer it back to the gap. The carved cheek takes the grey of the slope while the eyes refuse that grey for one more hold of sunset.