Musicians, and collaborative filmmakers, Kit Martin, who lives between London and France and Merve Erdem, Istanbul born, London based vocalist decided to expand the theory of their latest album Mantra Moderne with moving image.

The film C'est quoi le Mantra Moderne explores their aesthetic world, and a critique of themselves, their ideas, and their authenticity. The bilingual script, with English spoken by Merve Erdem and Kit Martin and French narrated by Nicolas Roys drifts between abstraction and realism, serving both as a snapshot of the duo immediately after their debut album, and a filmic essay exploring their medium, language and reality.

As a cathartic-like process, post the release of their album, the film is ​transformative and experimental, working with silence, discontinuity and repetition to destabilize the narrative coherence and the lucidity of meaning expected from a promotional film. The dissolution of the narrative helps the duo to play with a plurality of voices and a fragmented yet harmonious imagery while echoing the recording methods of the album, Mantra Moderne.

‍Filmed on 5 reels of Kodak 50D and 1 reel of Kodak 200T film, in the area largely where their album was recorded. The audio was recorded on cassette to respect the medium.

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Merve Erdem and Kit Martin: ​This film was born out of our interest in expressing our ideas and doubts about creativity and artistic authenticity through the cinematic medium. Having limited resources and time forced us to be precise and minimalist in our visual language and mirror the dualities that inspire us - of the prosaic and the poetic, the rural and the industrial, the authentic and the imitation - by means of a more aggressive editing style and of a script stuck between realism and abstraction.

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