Embrace by Christine Vandemoortele is a short film that deals in an absolutely original way with the path that the human mind takes in giving meaning and direction to one's choices. The director, born in Belgium and trained as a visual artist, has specialized over the years in installations that experimented with the use of the voice as an entity detached from the body. The voice as a universe in its own right, capable of going beyond the transfer that emits it, suggesting depths and imaginary spaces that belong to the collective spirit. Therefore no longer a human voice, but the voice of a soul that starts from the individual to universalize itself in a concept, only apparently abstract, of a collective mind. If the decisions and choices that an individual makes are in fact amenable to his specific needs, the inputs and mental paths that underlie them belong to the particular nature of every human being, and therefore lend themselves to an unlimited process of universalization. Starting from these assumptions, the artist soon discovered that the language of images, video art and cinema would offer her the most appropriate tools to make the results of her artistic reflections palpable. From here he began to make short films set in natural landscapes covered and commented on by his universal voices, thus representing, at the same time, symbolic versions of the mental landscape, and the crude indifference with which nature continues its journey towards eternity , deaf to the desires and dreams of men. With Embrace she reaches perhaps her highest level of visual contemplation. This time the landscape is that of a narrow canyon. As the director declares: "a journey into the heart of a gorge without branching paths, where even if you don't know where the journey leads, you have to go on". The guiding voice weaves a sort of dialogue, a question and answer in search of the right path that acts as a counterpoint to a barren and bare place that in fact does not seem to offer viable roads, but a single obligatory direction towards salvation. The human mind, taken by the doubts that come from social systems, initially does not seem to accept the existence of a mandatory path, and would like, as always, to debate among a thousand possibilities and conjectures. Nature, in its crudeness, instead suggests a much simpler solution: there are no right or wrong choices, but only "the path we are currently following". Thus, this slow flight in a dusty, angular, sharp, at times almost alien space - a sort of otherworldly journey in a planet that is only apparently hostile - leads the mind to a sudden turning point: the embrace with the infinity of the stars . "Per aspera ad astra", said the Latins, and never a motto was more appropriate to explain the arrival of the mind in this extraordinary visual journey. Once the only possible direction has been accepted, the one that crosses difficulties and pain without looking for shortcuts or compromises, the soul rejoins the stars, universal destiny, the beauty of creation. Cinema and visual art at the same time, therefore, where the path has only a conceptual semblance, to eventually become pure emotion.