SYNOPSIS

The Veil of Senses is a documentary on the perception of the world of congenitally blind people, i.e. individuals who have never had any visual experience of the world. Irene, Eugenio, and Massimiliano, by recalling their perceptual experiences of dreams, landscapes, and people using descriptions that involve non-visual sensory channels, accompany us in an immersive journey, made of sounds, surfaces, tastes and smells, suggesting new possibilities for representing reality.

INTENTION

The Veil of Senses stems from my former professional experience as an academic researcher in cognitive neuroscience, where I studied the neural and cognitive processes of perception, and from my obsession for epistemology, which is the study of how humans can have access to any knowledge of the world.

Even though the idea of making a film on the perceptual experience of people who never experienced vision may seem counterintuitive, its artistic conceptualization is rooted in neuroscience. Indeed, the brain is highly multisensorial and senses sometimes merge one into the other.

Through The Veil of Senses, I am using the visual component to expand the viewer's experience and subtly transform images into sensations, emotions, and concepts, making it a highly sensorial film. Optic-physical manipulation is used to break up the organicity of visual elements, and we are left with just ghosts, dismantled shapes, and shadows of the visual world.

Sounds faithfully match Irene, Eugenio, and Massimilano’s sensory impressions, building a synesthetic and immersive sound environment that engages the viewer with the blind people's perceptual dimension.