Private Project

Tau, the Daemon and the City

Tau is, at once, a fiction film on spirits, a documentary on the passing of time in a small town and a portrait of Catalan traditional culture.

An immaterial being talks us through the streets of a coastal town. Moving between people's feelings, dreams, and mindscapes, the spirit relentlessly looks for his double among the city inhabitants.

Tau is a docu-fiction portrait of a city, Tarragona, as seen through the “eyes” of a daemon who dwells in a parallel, and yet close to ours, reality. The story takes place somewhere between the contemporary world and the ancient times of myths, spirits and daemons. The film also explores cultural archetypes showing the eternal conflict between centralized and decentralized structures, between pyramids and networks.

  • Gerard Gil Fargas
    Director
    Maya Deren, Take Zero, Los Condenados, Los Pasos Dobles, El quadern de fang, La Propera Pell
  • Gerard Gil Fargas
    Writer
  • Gerard Gil Fargas
    Producer
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Tau, la ciutat i el daimon
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Feature
  • Genres:
    docu-fiction, fiction documentary
  • Runtime:
    2 hours 3 minutes 33 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 1, 2017
  • Country of Origin:
    Spain
  • Country of Filming:
    Spain
  • Language:
    Catalan
  • Shooting Format:
    DVCam
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • First Hermetic International Film Festival
    Venice
    Italy
    March 2, 2018
    International premiere
    Best Cinematography - Fludd Award, Best Storytelling - Cagliostro Award, Jury Award.
Director Biography - Gerard Gil Fargas


Gerard Gil (b. Tarragona 1976) has worked as a cameraman, director and editor for several Catalan broadcast media (Btv, TV3, Mediapro) and as a screenwriter for Spanish director J.A. Salgot. In 2005, along with Blai Mesa and David Fernández, he set up his own company: La Ferida Produccions.
During the last fifteen years, he has produced and directed several short experimental pieces, as well as documentaries like Cirlot, la mirada de Bronwyn (UAB international Film Essay award 2005), Maya Deren, Take Zero, co-directed with Jaime Ballada (IFF Rotterdam 2012) and TAU, the daemon and the city (triply awarded at FHIFF 2018, Venice).
As a video-artist, his works have been exhibited in the five continents, particularly his pieces "Quietud", "Miralls" and "Adagio", among others.
As a musician, he has composed several sountracks such as Los Condenados (Best Film Cuenca Festival 2009), Los Pasos Dobles (Concha de Oro San Sebastián 2011), or La Propera Pell (Best film Gaudí Prize 2017), all by Isaki Lacuesta and Isa Campo, and also for documentaries like Qatar, the race (2008) by Alba Sotorra or Valors (2013) by Morrosko Vila-Sanjuán.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The idea for "Tau, the daemon and the city" came at the time I was working as a cameraman for tv. I was often sent to record images for certain programmes. Sometimes it was a contest, sometimes news or cultural events; and, many times, while I was filming those “commissioned images”, I noticed, around me, other images that were much more interesting than the ones I was supposed to take. I soon realized that this was not a rare occurrence and that, in fact, every time one spends enough time, it doesn't matter where, if one is patient, valuable images show up. I recalled Victor Erice saying: “There's things that time doesn't give you if you can't wait”. I decided to put this assumption to practise and It soon came to me that I should make a film about my hometown. And, since I needed some departure point, I decided to capture an annual cycle.

I kept going out to the streets regularly with the camera, looking for the images reality had to offer. It took more than one year, but gradually I filmed less and less. Finally, in 2017, watching some of the raw footage after having long forgotten about it, I noticed that the images already looked old, that my city had changed and that technology had evolved too. My old camcorder didn't work properly any more and I would better hurry to capture all those tapes if I didn't want them to disappear in the drawer of abandoned projects and obsolete technologies.

An image says a lot about an eye, and this is true in the same measure for creators and viewers. I can say I feel the images in this film as a personal process (even if I was possessed by the daemon when I filmed them) and I can perfectly recall the total fusion with the present that I experienced shooting each one of them. As to the voice over text, it was fully dictated to me by the daemon after a reading of Plotinus' Enneads. It's hard to say wether we have ideas or ideas have us. Sometimes I feel as if the spirit has abandoned me and I miss him (or her), but on other occasions I'm not sure of where my thoughts end and where the daemon's begin.

Gerard Gil,
March 24th, 2017