They Shine

The 35mm film They Shine is set in the Californian Mojave Desert. Thousands of enormous solar panels punctuate the vast American desert. The panels – glistening machinery, slowly changing position to follow the sunrise – configure a mirror surface behind which another world unravels: divorced from technological reality, and guided by an equally disconnected, utopian and/or religious faith associated with the power of technology. The film intertwines scenes of the moving solar panels, performing a slow dance or refined choreography, with voices of people from the local community who express their thoughts about the future and talk about the images evoked by these machines. A site dominated by an extreme natural condition is no longer simply re-identified by its scientific exploitation for humankind, but moreover re-evolves as a transfigured 'second nature': a surface as impenetrable as the desert that it covers.