Square the Circle (Ympyrän neliöimisestä) è un corto sperimentale di Hanna Hovitie che dal 2023 a oggi ha collezionato moltissime presenze nei festival cinematografici dedicati ai cortometraggi, vincendo vari premi in tutto il mondo, anche in Italia. Lo scorso 15 dicembre è stato proiettato al Cagliari Essay Film, ottenendo la menzione speciale da parte della giuria giovani. Attraverso riprese surrealiste a 360°, animazioni in bianco e nero e una voice over, la regista finlandese, in prima persona, ci conduce nel viaggio esistenzialista di un cerchio, la forma fondamentale dell’universo eppure ironicamente anche metafora degli outsider, di chi sente di non appartenere all’ambiente intorno. Sorridiamo all’immagine di un bebè che cerca di mettere la formina del cuore dentro la stella per lo stesso motivo per cui soffriamo nel tentativo di far quadrare il cerchio, di incastrarci forzatamente da qualche parte: è semplicemente impossibile. 

Con Hanna Hovitie abbiamo brevemente parlato proprio di questo, del suo opposto – il rifugiarsi dentro una bolla – e anche di un’altra ricerca che non richieda né di rinunciare a sé né al mondo: l’appartenenza.

In Square the Circle a musical voice – yours – flows between images of geometry’s accuracy and the ones of existential inadequacy, expressed through a surrealist St. Exupery’s Little Princess on a boat, like a watery eye in the sky. What was the creative process? Did the text or the images come first? Or did you develop them at the same time?

The whole film was a circulation of “chicken and egg” where sometimes the chicken would give birth to the egg and sometimes the other way round.

It started out as a film school exercise but eventually turned into a professional production. The school exercise was to imagine the visual effects after writing the text. First write a text and then start imagining the visuals after. At the beginning it was a text spoken as a voice over, in addition to being simply a draft of roughly the first quarter of the film. Then the 360-visuals and a simplified version of the animation came in, redefining the writing as well. Writing, shooting and animating simultaneously influenced each other, leading this work to its final form.  

For example, there is this moment where an external person walks up to the camera and interacts with me. That was not planned. The single encounter on this lonely “planet” felt meaningful to the idea of the film, so afterwards I wrote the “scene” and the text revolving around this random moment. On the other hand, a text version of the very end existed since the beginning, and I spent a couple of years (not full time of course) brewing and wondering how to finish this work visually.

Your film deals with how hard it is for an outsider to fit in the mechanisms of contemporary society, much like a square to a circle, but at the same time you as the outsider protagonist set your own world in motion. Is it important to fit in within this society? Or is it more important to take the awareness of being who you are, not caring to try to fit a square in a circle?

The film begins with a quote from my mom: “Surely you’ll find your place”. Let that be the hope for us wanderers.

The easy answer is to encourage oneself and everyone to find their own awareness and way of existing, and yet, I feel it is too much to ask to “not care” to try to fit in. Of course we care. After all, we don’t want to just be alone in our little bubbles of existence, instead we want to encounter others in their bubbles and find belonging somewhere, or with someone. That’s somehow the life work of human beings and I sympathize very much with that. I guess at the core there is a difference between fitting in and belonging: sometimes we work very hard at fitting in – squeezing our circles to fit different types of squares – when the real work is figuring out the part which we belong to. When you belong, you don’t have to try to fit in. But what do you do if you feel like you don’t belong? That is a mysterious path that I believe many of us are on and that’s at the center of the film for me.

The circle is the simplest form on which the structure of the universe is based, with the least amount of energy consumption: a zero, which is nothing and, paradoxically, it is also the beginning of everything. I wonder, is the universe the first one to be lazy, as you claim in your film, or is the time of contemporary society to be over-accelerated in the name of a questionable striving for efficiency and effectiveness at all costs?

The universe is lazy and chaotic and I think we as humans try with any means to organize this chaos, thinking that the more we work, the more we get done. Laziness is a superpower that can be used for both good and bad, much like any superpower. There is real beauty in slowing down, resting, letting things happen “naturally”, taking our time in forming opinions, forming responses, achieving things, whatever it may be. For me the film is a celebration of this mentality. And yet, this kind of thinking should not be misused to excuse apathy or ignorance – which are different things.

Is there a thorny topic that you would like to see be more addressed in cinema?

I don’t care about topics, all topics are equal. What I call for in cinema is always “a truth”, an honest story. Honesty will always be in demand, and will always be relevant. Just give me your truth (even if/when it’s all made up).

 

Alessio Chiappi