As in everyday life, TOPOGRAPHY/SURFACE WRITING is a series of events, impressions, voices, ideas, sounds, images, texts and textures. In their constant flow they become a surface upon which we always move. Like Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," from which it is loosely adapted, the main theme is violence: physical, psychological, and environmental. However, the film does not give a portrait of violence in the conventional sense of representing it as spectacle or drama and therefore separate from the everyday, nor does it attempt to analyze or aestheticize the problem. Rather, the film attempts to show how integrated violence is in the very fabric of our lives. As the title suggests, TOPOGRAPHY/SURFACE WRITING is not an essay, but rather a mapping of new possibilities for seeing and thinking through the use of cinema that is neither authoritarian nor passive, but rather a challenge.