The great Ingmar Bergman once observed: “No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” His words continue to resonate today, carried by the evocative waters of the Venetian Lagoon towards the island of San Servolo, where, from September 10 to 12, the ONA Short Film Festival once again takes shape. At its core lies a belief in cinema as the ideal medium through which to convey messages that originate in sporting culture before transcending sport itself and reaching towards something deeper. Something capable, indeed, of touching the conscience, stirring emotion and reaching those hidden chambers of the soul. Of teaching us to open our perspectives towards other corners of the world, other communities and other individuals.

As has now become a tradition, we accompany this meaningful gathering with a dedicated editorial series. At the heart of this focus are director Smriti Keshari and his short film, ‘The Selfish Gene’, scored by British producer Adam Freeland, shot by Byron Shah, edited by Isabel Freeman and titles by Constantin ‘Coco’ Demner.

As always, we like to begin with something we consider fundamental to every person we interview, just as it is to every filmmaker taking part in the ONA Short Film Festival: from childhood to the present day, what kind of relationship have you developed with the imagery and imagination of sport? In what ways has sport been, and does it continue to be, a source of inspiration in the way you see the world?

Smriti Keshari: “For me it begins with the body: I was always moving, running, swimming, dancing, climbing, falling, playing. As a child, I was fascinated by the physical fact of a body doing something completely. There is a moment in sport, especially as a child, when you’re not thinking about the effort. The body seems to know what to do before the mind has time to interfere. That becomes more difficult as you grow older. As a surfer and a runner, you train consciously, over and over again, try to do better the next time than you did the time before but eventually you kinda reach a point where you have to stop consciously controlling it. You just run. Or you’re in the water.  There’s a kind of inner peace in that. 

Professionally, sport has given me another perspective. I’ve had the privilege of working as both a director and an executive producer on sports stories around the world. As an executive, I learned about the scale of the business and the enormous machinery that exists around sport, and the millions of people who care about it. As a filmmaker, I am so interested in stories behind those grand sports moments and where the tensions lie: you have a single athlete completely alone in a frame, and somehow the entire world is on their shoulder. Two recent Italian films do this. Futura, by Rohrwacher, Marcello and Munzi, in which teenagers are asked what they think is coming and one of them speaks about boxing. And Yuri Ancarani’s San Siro, which watches a stadium prepare for a match it never shows you.

Sport is one of the few things I know that can move across language, geography and generations without asking permission. A swimmer in one country, a boxer in another, a surfer somewhere else, we may know nothing about each other, but we understand the body and we connect to it. I have an unreasonable faith in culture–music, art, sport, these are some of the things that give me faith. That’s probably why I keep coming back to simple acts of movement: swimming, running, moving, getting lost. Before the competition, before the audience, before the story, there is just a body moving through space. That is such a fun place to begin.”

How, on the other hand, did visual storytelling enter your life? What does it represent to you today? And how do you interpret the relationship between the seventh art—extended here to include documentary filmmaking—and the world of sport?

Smriti Keshari: “My first visual memories are from growing up in Varanasi: the university where my mother did her PhD, the courtyard we lived in, running up and down the stairs with my brother and the neighborhood kids, the wild monkeys moving through the streets. I remember those things less as narratives than as fragments of images. I tend to create jump cuts in my head: something I see in one place suddenly connects to something I saw somewhere completely different. Having moved across the world as much as I have, I’m always drawing those connections. A gesture, a posture, a face, a landscape can suddenly belong to another time or another place. Often the image arrives before I understand why it belongs there. Cinema feels natural to me because editing is the physical manifestation of those mental jump cuts. You put two images next to each other and something happens between them. Neither image has changed, but the meaning has. 

My work in sports storytelling has made me increasingly interested in the space between the individual and the collective. As a director, I’m looking for the tiny things: a breath, a hand, a moment of hesitation, the solitude of an athlete. I’ve seen how that tiny moment can become part of a story experienced by millions of people. I think about George Gervin and David Thompson, ‘Ice’ and ‘Skywalker’ as they were nicknamed; they brought a creativity and verticality to the guard and wing positions that changed what those positions could look like and gave birth to the new style of NBA, as we know it. Steph Curry belongs to that lineage. Each of them invented a gesture that everyone else then copied. And then there’s a girl on a playground pulling up from thirty feet.

A single body can be completely alone in a frame, and yet it carries with it a weight. Sport makes that especially visible. A swimmer, a runner, a surfer or a basketball player performs in a way that someone on the other side of the world understands immediately. The culture surrounding the gesture may be completely different, but the body speaks first. Cinema gives us the opportunity to notice that. I don’t necessarily want to tell the audience what the connection is. Isn’t it more fun to put the images next to one another and allow them to discover new things?”

‘The Selfish Gene’ is an aesthetic ode to the athletic gesture of diving. Starting with the title itself, can you explain what you wanted to explore and express through this short film? And what drew you to compose such an evocative sequence of athletic forms?

Smriti Keshari: “The film came from a time when I was trying to understand humanity’s pursuit of immortality in stories. I began with a question I found universal across cultures and throughout history: in what ways might human beings achieve immortality? That question led me to evolutionary biology, and eventually to Richard Dawkins’s ‘The Selfish Gene.’ I became fascinated by his proposition that genes, not individuals, are evolution’s enduring protagonists, replicating themselves across millennia while bodies serve as temporary vessels. It’s a seductive idea, really, how Dawkins describes the human body as a survival machine, engineered by genes whose only imperative is continuity. We inherit sequences that have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, so if the body is merely an instrument for genetic survival, where does consciousness reside? Where does will or freedom begin? 

Around this time, I had become a dedicated runner. Long distances altered my understanding of the body. Running is a paradox: the more deliberate the training, the less deliberate the movement becomes. There comes a point when thought recedes and the body performs, no narration, no story. More recently, while reading Cat Bohannon’s remarkable book Eve, I came across the idea of Mitochondrial Eve, the common maternal ancestor whose mitochondrial DNA survives in every living human. She is not the biblical Eve, but the trace of an ancient continuity passing from body to body. It was another way of imagining immortality, not as an escape from the body, but as something that moves through it, kind of like reincarnation.

The other night, while watching The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger at Anthology Film Archives, I was struck by Berger’s words on how the body is never merely an object but the place from which we encounter the world, as another way of seeing. While running, you experience something similar: a body stripped of excess, reduced to rhythm, breath, and repetition. Diving has a similar paradox, but compressed into a few seconds. Years of discipline produce a movement that, at the moment it happens, can look completely effortless. The athlete has controlled every detail, and then has to surrender to gravity.”

The sky, used as the backdrop throughout the entire short film, and the soundtrack both play a defining role in the work, accompanying a mosaic of dives performed by athletes of different genders and generations. How did these elements come together and interact within your creative process? And more broadly, how does your creative process unfold?

Smriti Keshari: “Right before making ‘The Selfish Gene,’ I was living in London and would often sit inside St. Paul’s Cathedral and stare up at the mosaics and paintings of people. I could get lost there for hours and imagined them and their stories as a kaleidoscope of one another. Then I moved to Los Angeles and lived near the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center, and somehow I began seeing the divers in a similar way. The bodies were moving through the sky, but I was looking at them almost as I had been looking at those figures in the cathedral; compositions, gestures, bodies suspended against something much larger than themselves. So the sky was partly a practical decision, and then it became a conceptual one. 

Once you remove architecture and landscape, you remove many of the things that tell us where we are. What remains is the body. A diver enters the frame and, for a few seconds, there is no obvious scale. They could be falling, flying, disappearing, returning; there’s something almost trance-like about it. The music came from a similar instinct. Ads (Adam Freeland) and I have collaborated for many years, so our conversations tend to be less about explaining what something should be and more about talking about what is driving our curiosity at the moment. We were interested in repetition and rhythm, and in that strange point where repetition begins to alter your sense of time. As a runner, I’ve experienced that feeling physically. You become aware of breath, pulse, rhythm; thought becomes less useful. Sound can do something similar to a person, it can change the speed at which time is experienced. That’s why I’m always in such awe of musicians. 

I’m currently working on a new project about the history of sound, recording technology and jazz, and I’ve been struck by how often musicians describe losing themselves in the studio. My process usually starts with a question rather than an answer. I collect images, gestures, fragments and sounds, and allow them to sit beside each other until they begin to tell us the story. Editing is a kind of thinking, and luckily it doesn’t always need to be verbal. Sometimes you simply put one image next to another and wait. If you’re lucky, they tell you something you didn’t know when you started.”

Your ‘The Selfish Gene’ will be screened on San Servolo before the ONA audience. What feelings arise when you imagine your work taking shape in such a singular setting, surrounded by the Venetian Lagoon? And what would you ultimately like the ONA audience to carry with them after experiencing the film?

Smriti Keshari: “I have never been to Venice so it’ll be my first time during the festival. I have, however, seen a great deal of it: films, photographs, paintings, and all the writing that surrounds the place. It seems to be perpetually metamorphosing. Arriving in person will presumably be a useful correction on how little an image can actually prepare you for a place. Over the last few years I’ve been going back to Italy more often, tracing my husband’s family’s origins and reconnecting with his relatives. I’m particularly curious about coming to San Servolo, surrounded by the lagoon, where the water and sky sit so close together, as they do in ‘The Selfish Gene.’

As for what I’d like the audience to carry away, I’d rather not decide that for them. I hope the Venetian audience tells me what the film is about. They’ve been looking at the sky and water for a very long time there, and I suspect they may have a few things to teach me. I’m excited to get notes.”