Enchanted Matter
An Australian-born architect walked away from everything familiar. Over decades in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Japan, China and Tibet, Robert Powell became one of the most extraordinary ethnographic artists of the modern era — capturing shrines, ceremonial spaces, and ritual objects in pen-and-ink drawings of almost impossible precision.
In Enchanted Matter, Powell's drawings fill the screen in 10K resolution with a hyperreal intensity that Film Threat described as "subtle but trippy" — pulling viewers not out of reality but deeper into it. The film was completed posthumously by producers Geoff Rockwell and director Tom Piozet after Powell's passing in 2020, edited by Golden Globe and Emmy-nominated editor Kathryn Himoff. It marks a return to Santa Barbara International Film Festival for Piozet, whose earlier documentary Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion won SBIFF's Audience Award and went on to wide theatrical release.
"A well-constructed, beautiful, and revelatory documentary.... A stunning, mesmerizing film. The objects almost come to life in a subtle, but trippy way, a path to the transcendent. Director Tom Piozet...has not just captured magic, but conjured it himself."
If you've ever...
Stood inside a building that made you feel something you couldn't explain…
felt that the world has been over-explained into sterility…
felt the gravity of a breathtaking cultural heritage site… and worried about it getting destroyed.
Then you’re in the right place…
Re-enchantment:
Seeing the World as Alive Again
I think for everybody, art makes the world strange again."
In a world trained to explain everything, it's easy to stop seeing. To move through buildings without feeling them. To look at sacred objects and register only material. To stand in places shaped by centuries of meaning and experience only surfaces.
Enchanted Matter is a film about the moment that stops — the moment when craft, architecture, and ritual objects feel alive again. Not through argument or lecture, but through an experience that lingers. Viewers and critics reach for the same words: mesmerizing, hypnotic, spellbinding. As Film Threat put it, the film is "a reminder that art can focus our attention on the sublime and give us a path to the transcendent. Enchantment is all around us if we know where and how to look."
"THE IMAGES HAVE AN ALMOST HALLUCINATORY IMPACT...MOST OF THE IMAGES ARE STUNNINGLY STRANGE, ALMOST HALLUCINATORY.
He draws them in such an animistic way that their walls heave with breath and flush with feeling, despite the superficial formality of Powell's inanimate subject matter. The skill he exhibits in capturing something that lies beyond what can be seen. A reality beyond the physical that can be known only through intuition and not through the senses."
The Digital Premiere Is Coming. Be There First.
Take a piece of the film home: two original soundtrack tracks by Craig Dobbin (NCIS), plus Robert Powell's extraordinary artwork as downloadable screensavers.
