I am the heron. A woman's voice recalls an extraordinary encounter with a heron beside a stream. Was it a dream, a hallucination, or exhaustion from overwork? Tales the Water Told follows the water's course, attending to human and more-than-human presences often left unseen and unheard. As Zurich's outskirts rapidly expand, ancient marshes disappear, displacing long-rooted inhabitants and erasing traces too faint to notice beneath the changing landscape. (This film is screened with The Araon Log.)

Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo’s Tales the Water Told is a speculative documentary that reconsiders the relationships humans have formed with nonhuman beings. “I am a heron.” The film begins at the moment when a human voice borrows the position of another species. Whether this is a dream, a fantasy, or the arrival of another mode of perception remains uncertain. Yet what ultimately acquires a voice is not any single individual, but the landscape itself. Flowing through the time of the city, water remembers traces of disappearing lives and becomes a narrator observing the world humans have made. In this way, Tales the Water Told unfolds as an urban fable spoken by water.
Amid the changing landscapes on the outskirts of Zurich, the film places the human-built city beside the temporalities of lives that existed long before it. The camera lingers on barely perceptible traces and minute movements, calling attention to beings that have escaped the human gaze. Its meticulously designed soundscape creates latent tension within quiet scenery, weaving the movement of water, the flight of birds, and urban noise into a single sensory rhythm. Nature is no longer something for humans to observe and classify, but a presence with its own time and voice. Unfolding as both fable and meditative journey, Tales the Water Told gradually unsettles the belief that humanity stands at the center of the world.

Tales the Water Told turns to film as a medium through which to hear the voices and inherent language of water. Through a change of viewpoint, it becomes possible to apprehend water as a place where ecosystems come together. Encouraging a radical decentring, the film proposes a change of perception that reveals fragile multi-species worlds and cohabitations. This shift invites us to reflect on the colonisation of natural areas that mankind has carried out over the ages, polluting waters and imposing on flora and fauna its arbitrary classification of life, its disregard, its violence.

 

• ProducerLaura ROMANO
• Screenplay Maria IORIO, Raphaël CUOMO
• Cinematography Raphaël CUOMO
• Edit Maria IORIO, Raphaël CUOMO
• Sound Gilles AUBRY, Maria IORIO
• Music Diane BARBÉ, FAYTINGA, Minami SAEKI
• Cast Feven AFEWORKI, Minami SAEKI

Iorio/Cuomo | Maria IORIO | info@iorio-cuomo.org