Paradise

• 2009
• 1hr 22 mins
• Documentary

Paradise has been compared to a notebook, a diary and a sketchbook. It is a collection of discrete moments, unscripted and unstaged, shot digitally over several years, none lasting longer than four minutes. There is no voiceover or onscreen text to link or explain the fragments. These moments have little in common other than that they are all instants of beauty or happiness. While there is footage from nine different countries, the final section is centered on the US. There is little direct reference to 9/11 and the wars that followed, but those events – as Almeryeda puts it – “cast a shadow over the film.” If there is perhaps the faintest strain of melancholy in the film, it is because the film can’t help but point out that, unlike Paradise, these moments don’t last.