Rhodes: Buried Land is a continuation of ideas I have been exploring through gallery media art. What first fascinated me in the story of the people of Visoko was the existential parable of a people transformed by a pyramid that could not be seen, but only imagined. I wanted to capture in the film the relationship between cinema production and the pursuit of a dream: both strenuous pursuits by a community to manifest something from an idea. Taking inspiration from current trends in realist cinema, such as the work of Jia Zhang Che and Claire Denis, and the films of Jean Rouch and Eric Rohmer, we searched for a method of filmmaking that could honor both the real people of Visoko and the motivations of their dreams.

Eastwood: Often I find myself looking for the possibility of intersection between cinema and the lived world, for events where the actual experiences of a group or an individual might be developed—completed, even—by the lens of filmmaking. Kiarostami's Close-Up is a big influence in this respect, as is neo-realist cinema. The people of the town of Visoko have already been subject to mediation from the outside, and certainly the trap of poor representation seemed to surround us on all sides when we conducted our research, reaching its zenith when the production was likened to Borat. And so we placed the wild imaginary and the folly of filmmaking, with its inevitable manipulations, back into the story of Buried Land, asking, how does one document or articulate something whose truth has many sides? I enjoy that no two audience members having watched the film could come to the same decision as to the validity of the pyramid claims, nor for that matter who was acting and who wasn't. The film is not about whether the pyramids are true or false.