Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
loved it.
After thirty years as an experimental filmmaker, Nathaniel Dorsky, at the close of the 90s, produced some of his best, most powerful work yet. Among these films, the incomparable Alaya stands as a formal and technical masterpiece. Called "little short of a miracle" by
Stan Brakhage, Alaya is composed of a series of extreme close-ups of grains of sand and sand dunes. Playing with the perception of space and time, Dorsky stretches the dimensions of physicality and creates a wondrous, impossible landscape in the viewer's mind. After repeated viewings, the understated rhythm of the editing becomes more obvious, and this submerged level of information adds to the film's already rich meaning. Formal yet intuitive, Alaya is a masterful envisioning of the reality we inhabit. ~ Brian Whitener, All Movie Guide