Benny Safdie

Five planets of his ten occupy water signs and not one sits in air, with three in fire and two in earth. Water takes on the temperature of whatever it is nearest, and there is nothing at all in the chart that steps outside a situation to describe it calmly. Safdie directs films, and the one the record names is built almost entirely out of pressure that never lets up for its whole length.

Four planets group across twenty two degrees of Pisces: the Sun, Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. Pisces keeps no firm edge and takes the shape of whatever it has entered, which for a director is the capacity to be inside a character's panic rather than observing it from the outside. The Moon answers from Virgo, directly across the zodiac, correcting and checking. Between them they describe somebody who can lose himself in a thing and then cut it precisely.

The Sun sits opposite that Moon at just over a degree, so he was born very near the full moon, and the two are braced in a T-square with Saturn. Public and private halves facing each other, with the planet of limits at the apex, is a configuration under permanent load. A second trio of Mars, Saturn and Uranus sits in Sagittarius, and Pluto alone was retrograde at his birth.

Jupiter stood on its Pisces birth degree once more on 3 January 2022, at thirty five. That is the planet of reach returning to a sign where edges dissolve, so what it asks is not how far a thing travelled but how much of it was taken on. Three circuits had closed by then, and the film the record names sits inside the most recent of the three. For a director working with no air at all in the chart, the absence of any calm outside view is less a gap than a description of the films themselves.