Silica

A location scout lands in the desert of South Australia suffering from a nasty case of jetlag. She’s doing research for a film set on another planet and has come to visit the local opal mining towns, but it turns out that most of the settlements are deserted. The combination of exhausted mines and competition from imitation stones means that mine workers have moved away, leaving behind caves and houses and the relics of other science fiction films shot in the area. In the end, these will have as much impact on the landscape as the Aboriginal people who have been leaving signs throughout the region for thousands of years. In this fiction-essay hybrid, filmmaker Pia Borg examines what it means to feel at home somewhere. Can an alien place feel familiar? Was it precisely this utterly dissociative quality of the desert that gives opal, the region’s primary resource, its value? After all, the stone also plays a role in Aboriginal mythology and superstition. Reality and fabrication intertwine in a succession of microscopic shots of opals, computer-generated landscapes and 35mm footage.