Terra Long

Date palms imported and cultivated decades ago flourish in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. A cacophony of voices from across generations reflect on the shifting landscape of the region; some remember the first few acres that were planted, while others enjoy the luxuries of new golf courses. Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensorially vibrant 16mm experience that takes us on a journey of past, present, and future. Director Terra Long hand-processed the footage utilizing leftover dates and native plants intertwining the environment into the fabric of the film. Through complex and nuanced scenes, non-sync interviews blossom into a wonderfully gentle but memorable portrait of a community in flux.

For those who electrical sensitivity, there aren’t many places to seek refuge. In a remote part of West Virginia, the so-called National Radio Quiet Zone offers one such escape.

Twin portraits: an immediate love between new friends considering motherhood under the roof of a fierce matriarch; and Cheru the dog, shortly after birthing five pups. A swim, a birth, a love, and a loss developed in hibiscus and lavender and saturated in deep blues.

Filmed in vibrant super 16mm color, and black and white film, Notes from the Anthropocene, is a sensory elegy to the dinosaur. The dinosaur icon shifts from narratives of extinction, to human exceptionalism, and power. Its materiality whether fossil or plastic toy has, through popular culture, become entrenched in the imaginary of oil extraction and fossil fuel production. Notes from the Anthropocene is a speculative iconological look at the dinosaur, delivered by an imagined museum guide who ponders our symbolic relationship to an increasing ambivalence towards the natural world. The mythic dinosaurs that emerge resist domestication and seek to transcend fantasies of human dominion.

A bald eagle is treated for lead poisoning, becoming a symbol of a toxic system that threatens us all.

Animated meditation on motion through stillness with breath. Shot in single frames on 16mm and hand painted.

In Terra Long’s 350 MYA, a sheet whips before the camera, shaped by the same wind that forms the rigid, undulating lines of sand below it as the film conjures the continued presence of the now vanished Rheic Ocean in the Tafilalt region of the arid Sahara Desert.