Waterlands

Waterlands, excerpt, 4K video, color, b&w, sound, 15 min, 2023.

Waterlands is part film-essay, part meditation on a landscape: the vast network of lakes, streams, and forests known as the Boundary Waters. The film is composed of a voiceover reflections on early film history and well as shots of reflections on the Boundary Waters lakes and streams. Reflections in the water show the landscape upside down. During the editing process in post-production, I flip the frame and tip the reflections upright, creating a painterly experience of the landscape. The landscape seen through its watery surfaces frustrates the expectation of a neat, readable image, and instead offers a slippery, blurry space between the reflection and its counterpart. The film stalks the Boundary Waters landscape as an entry point into cinema’s ability to balance on the boundary between life and death, light and darkness, stillness and re-animation.