Anri Sala

Long Sorrow, says Sala, is the result of a ‘rather particularly set-up situation, rather than a narrative structure. It’s more a succession of tinted situations, colored by moments of tension, gestures and music that can make you feel’. The location for this event is Märkische Viertel, an area in Berlin with dense apartment buildings, close to where the wall used to be. The longest building here is nicknamed by its inhabitants ‘Long Sorrow’.In the film, suspended outside of the top floor of the building, the free jazz saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc responds to the city around him, improvising a piece with only his head visible through the window from inside the apartment. Sala positions his subject in suspension, such that the experience of place and sound is itself a prolongation of the architecture of the ‘Long Sorrow’.