THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

HELL IS A PLACE ON EARTH

Title: Hell is a Place on Earth
Year of Release: 2022
Director: Frank Okabe
Principal Boy: Enzo Hofmann as The Boy
Genre: Short, horror, psychological
Country of Production: Brazil
Length: 10 minutes
Language: English
Availability: The film exists in digital format.

Synopsis
A man isolated at home due to the world going into lockdown as a result of the coronavirus pandemic is haunted by his own inner demons. The voiceover narration for this film is a reading of an English translation of the 1933 poem Tabacaria (English translation: The Tobacco Shop), by  'Álvaro de Campos', which was one of over seventy 'heteronyms' (personae or alter egos) adopted by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). The complete poem, in English translation, can be read online here.

This complex poem presents a narrator who has never achieved anything and will live and die anonymously like nearly all the billions of human beings who live now or who have ever lived (and, one presumes, like the man in Okabe's film). His feeling of emptiness is all the greater because he doesn't really know what he wants or even what he is ("When I went to take off the mask,/It was stuck to my face."), and the famous opening stanza defines him in terms of absolute negatives (I'm nothing./I'll always be nothing./I can't want to be something.").

The theme of the poem is the search for self, and Okabe's film maybe suggests that this search, intensified by the isolation of lockdown, could disclose strange or frightening aspects of the psyche, symbolised by the man seeming to eat a human heart which has presumably been cut from the boy who arrives in a luggage case. This short film is, in any case, a surprisingly intense and unsettling, and yet haunting, collage of sound and image.

(There was an alternative edit of this video, which differs from the more widely distributed version in including some shots of a boy's naked torso. The additional clips displayed in this version are not of Enzo Hofmann, but are instead taken from a German video release from some years before.)

A very brief trailer for the film (46 seconds) can be viewed on Vimeo here. (The film website no longer exists.)

Screencaps