BETWEEN ASHES AND ALGORITHMS directed by Jordi Piris

Between Ash and Algorithm is a creative documentary short film directed by Jordi Piris, offering a sensory journey into the ritual heart of contemporary India. Through hypnotic imagery, immersive soundscapes, and a reflective voice-over, the film explores how the sacred transforms, resists, and sometimes becomes spectacle. It reveals profound tensions: between truth and performance, ancestral mysticism and modern commerce, the sadhu who renounces the world and the one who records his devotion on a mobile phone.

The film emerges from the director’s second journey to India, a trip marked by wonder, contradiction, and the need to understand how millennia-old traditions coexist with advanced technology and a visible, pulsating chaos. In places such as the Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj 2025, Varanasi, and the streets of Delhi, Piris captures gestures, silences, and rituals that reflect a spirituality in transformation, where faith becomes political identity and the eternal struggles to survive in a world that monetizes it.

The visual approach is rooted in direct immersion: lightweight cameras, proximity to rituals, and a narrative built solely through observation, without interviews or explanations. Sound —chants, murmurs, engines, water— becomes a central element, composing a symphony of the invisible. Each sequence functions as a poetic block that suggests more than it explains, inviting the viewer to feel India from within.

Jordi Piris, who holds a degree in Information Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a photography diploma from the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya, is a director and audiovisual creator with extensive experience in documentary, fiction, news, and advertising. His work blends journalistic rigor, photographic sensitivity, and a deep interest in exploring spaces where the human and the symbolic intertwine.