Descent into the Valley

“Descent into the Valley” is a documentary about Peeter Laurits – photographer and artist – who, like a singular trickster or shaman, conjures at the threshold of different worlds and realities. Moving between art, science, mythology, esotericism and ecology, he builds highways from the level of mosquitoes and bark beetles straight into cosmic spheres. Director Johan Huimerind, himself with a background in photographic art, follows Laurits through Kütiorg, a place that is at once a studio and a strangely shifted mystical realm where time and space refuse linear logic and past, present and imagination coexist. The valley draws the viewer into its lush green spell, offering refuge to those who long for summer warmth and birdsong. Kütiorg, where Laurits settled in the mid 1990s, becomes the film’s central metaphor: an apparently small place whose invisible trajectories and winding paths open new ways of perceiving the world. Through conversations, creative processes and performative everyday life, the film reveals Laurits in a space where low and high, solemn and mundane, heaven and compost heap exist side by side.