In the film ”when” Ottar Ormstad is transferring his practice as concrete poet to the realm of a programmable networked space, blending his poetry with specially composed modern music with electronic elements. His b/w photographs developed in the darkroom are presented in combination with words in different languages, some of them exceeded into ”letter-carpets”. Some sentences are from well known songs or films, other letter-combinations are invented by the author.
The film is telling a story about life and death, basically from the standpoint of cars, rotten in a field in Sweden. The narrative is very open, and each viewer may experience the film very differently. This is also dependent upon the language background, any translation is – intentionally – not given.
when has been screened at festivals for experimental short film, so far in France, Romania, Russia and Norway.