... When You Look Away

A remark by her young daughter, who sometimes wakes up in the morning unsure whether she’s a person or an animal, inspires Phie Ambo to pose a metaphysical question about the nature of consciousness. Is it attached to the body or does it transcend the physical world? Ambo decides to explore this question and first approaches the popular physicist Holger Bech Nielsen, one of the fathers of string theory. She decides to allow herself to be led by association: each of the people with whom she speaks brings her into contact with the next. We hear from an artist, a clairvoyant and a zen teacher, as well as an amateur researcher who has used intuitive methods to find a solution to a practical problem. Water, a recurring element in the images interwoven with the interviews, appears to be the key to the mystery. A study in the laboratory is the ultimate test—not for the tenability of this notion, but for the usefulness of the empirical method.