Sadalsuud (2020), a 40-minute concert-film by composer Emanuel Pimenta and filmmaker Dino Viani, observes people around the world whose everyday lives have been transformed by the pandemic. This state of quiet isolation that has touched all of society, has brought personal reflection and unexpected problems. Feeling the stark reality of the interconnection of life has brought the obvious conclusion that Mother Nature is in charge. The camera alternates its focus to the small creatures of nature and beautiful landscapes unaffected by this human crisis.

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Emanuel Pimenta:
I wanted to create a work that superseded the virus and touched the humanity of people. So I contacted dozens of people in Italian Switzerland and in Italy, the two places most devastated by the pandemic, and asked them to send me what they were hearing internally and externally as they had become prisoners in their own homes. The sounds of the world had changed, the streets were the cities were changed. Thirty-nine people replied and sent me 66 recordings.
 

I contacted my friend Italian filmmaker Dino Viani, a great poet of cinema and suggested Viani use the same process to create a movie of what people were looking at during their pandemic isolation.

The objective was to produce a common work - music and film, created totally independently, as I have done since the 1970s, also with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, following the French dramaturgist Antonin Artaud's principle of independence of the arts. The result would be a concert-movie, or a movie-concert. Two independent works in a single project, comprised of a collage of the actions of people using their ears and eyes to record the world around them. Sadalsuud has involved people in Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Spain, the United States, China, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and more.