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In her youth, Joan of Arc did many household chores: spun wool, helped her father in the fields and looked after their animals. She made soap by mixing dirt, tallow and ashes. Her mother provided Joan’s religious education as a daughter of the Catholic Church.

At night, my family showers, then I shower.

We all use the same bar of soap, and the wind from the open bathroom window blows the water and the stray hairs from the corner to the left. I pick them up from the drain and arrange it in twirls on the tiles along with the dirt, tallow, ashes stuck to the porcelain floor. And tomorrow the soap is smaller. Around 1453 years before Joan of Arc’s death, Pliny the Elder, whose writings
chronicle life in the first century AD, describes soap as “an invention of the Gauls”.The word sapo, Latin for soap, is connected to a mythical Mount Sapo, a hill near the River Tiber where animals were sacrificed.

I drive through a long tunnel at the mountain’s base. The glowing image of the landscape at the end of it widens as I approach, revealing a pasture where a herd of wild horses graze near a flowing stream. Not many animals were sacrificed in Roman religions, except for eating. One of the only known exceptions is the October Horse, a sacrifice to the god of war, during horse racing festivals at the end of the agricultural season in the third century BC. The frame of the tunnel breaks my vision, sunlight beams past as the wind whips. The horses pass, the stream runs red as it rolls by my window.

The sound of a flock of birds lifting in the air!

Cinema is an exhibition of works that collect and assemble time.