The world where we live in is not the real world

Efi Amanatidou | 

2022 | 

Greece | 

2:53 mins | 

The World Where We Live in Is Not The Real World, by Efi Amantidou, is a short and sweet film gathered around poetic images of peace and harmony. The initial images work more in evocation and emotion than intellectual thought. Indeed, as the surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky makes clear in a surprising appearance, the realm words and thoughts is not the real world.

The principal thought connected to this film is the difference of images to that we are bombarded with in everyday life. Normal understandings of the “real world” focus on violence, dominant news topics and suffering. Indeed, the “real world” call fo the realist is usually a thin veil for nihilism. However, these images are equally part of the world. If they induce peace and make us feel, why should we not encounter them?

The central crux of the film thus focuses on the idea of what this real world is. According to Jodorowsky, and shared by Amantidou, is the conviction that the everyday world of thoughts, images and ideas – chiefly intellectualised – is not the ‘real world’ but an abstraction. This abstraction of thought seems to obscure an inherent peace to existence. Indeed, Jodorowsky says that as one plants a tree it is not us planting the tree but an act of peace inherent within us, immanent within the whole world. The continuum of thought is thus an act of violence.

The radical proposition of this short and wonderful work is thus: peace starts internally. Though actions may suffice, it is the turning inwards to understand how our thoughts shape the world in violent ways that produces the necessary compassion and understanding of the world. If we can come to a place of understanding thoughts that split the world into subject-object relations is the first act of violence, then an ethical intervention in thought may lay the foundation for renewed modes of being.