Lois Patiño

Abstract

This is the first extensive, career interview in English with Lois Patiño. After several years making films and installation work about mental illness and the moment of death, Patiño found his métier as a landscape artist, focusing on landscape as a spiritual entity. Patiño works in the tradition of place-oriented cinema pioneered by Larry Gottheim, James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, and Peter Hutton. In Patiño’s films human beings are seen as parts of the landscape, sometimes in a more literal sense, as in Costa da morte (2013) his feature about the Galician coast of Spain, and at other times in more mythic senses. Patiño’s films are stunningly beautiful and demonstrate that digital filmmaking can compete with even the most visually remarkable celluloid works.