Concept
Mater Mortem is an intellectual ghost story, ridden with hauntology and psycho-analytical concepts, supported through a non-linear narrative.
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The story revolves around a beautiful grim reaper-style character who traverses through time and the intracsies of limbo, in search of her deceased son.
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Through this, she finds herself reaping a long line of suspicious deaths, each one edging her closer to finding her lost child.
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The concept originated from a philosophical debate about the irrelevance and inaccuracy of Time in relation to life, it's meaning and it's purpose. Resulting in the wider ideology of Mater Mortem, which provides the basis for the rules of the filmic world that we have created, all of which is based upon this philosophical manifesto on the relationship between time and film, written by the Director:
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It has always fascinated me that people like to sit and look at the stars, you see they are dead you know. They don’t burn anymore. Most people know this, but they still watch them, they describe them as beautiful. And that is just it, the time that we spend watching the stars slowly die an eternity after they already have, in those moments we are appreciating of something that is stuck in a time loop. It is forever something beautiful that is all at the same time something that is about to be, something that is, and something that once was. It just depends on your perspective as it takes time for the light to travel and so we and the stars are in both the same time and completely different time at once.
And in that way stars are like people I suppose. We learn to love them, watch them in their beautiful lives. But, they are all slowly dying. And years after they do leave us we will still continue to watch their beautiful life as a memory or imagen it as a story. Until the last person who saw them, or heard of them dies and they are lost like the stars. I think that this is why people want to become filmmakers or actors. To have a part of them, whether it be their image or their idea, captured and prolonged in life. It is a moment preserved. An impulse if you will, that can last a little longer. It’s the same with books, art, photographs etc. they are a moment suspended.
a beautiful thought, in my opinion anyway. And it makes time so redundant don’t you think? But then again time is redundant anyway, it is a fractured concept, it almost works. I know, shock, horror. But, it is true. Time does not actually work, we must adjust our clocks twice a year and add an extra day every few years just to keep time simple. Time works for the small things like how long to cook something or coordinating actions but on a grand scale, it just does not quite do it.
Like the idea of the stars, they are already dead which makes us behind their time. We are watching their past. And that is just one example that we know of, so how many more breaks are there in time? Is time then relative? I mean does a person who dies at 80 feels like they have lived a full life? How does that compare to the life of someone who dies young? There are so many questions about time. But, my main thought on time is if as we have established with the ideas of stars and memories that multiple time fragments can be at the same moment in different places is it not more logical to view time as a stack as opposed to a line? I am not proposing that everything ever is happening all at once but what if some are. So maybe not a stack, but a stack of lines, or loops. For do the stars as we see them know that they are dead? Or if they were to have some consciousness would they just restart the loop knowing nothing of before or what is yet to come but simply starting again?
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I hold no answers just questions that raise more questions. But, I suppose I would like to believe that true. Not a reincarnation or a second life but a loop. Like a film, when that story ends you can watch it again and nothing will change. You will already know the story but the characters are reset. Their actions will be same but they will have no knowledge of that. For they are a moment that has been suspended from context. To our perspective they have lost their possibility as we know the end and the journey to that end but, inside the film from the characters perspective they have every possibility. And maybe that is what death truly is. It is the reset, but only of ourselves.