Directing
Vancouver composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp was the only woman to participate in the original version of the World Soundscape project that not only brought new ears to city life, but laid the foundation for noise bylaws/pollution standards, radically upending traditional notions of music and the role of the composer. Hildegard has brought the art of sound walking to groups around the world, and she has formulated a deep feminist ecology rooted in the body. The film offers a place for the viewer to listen, the necessary precondition for personal and societal change.
A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace the neo-liberal consensus? Cast in a palimpsest of images and sounds, as if there were no way to separate inside and out, the street and the bedroom.
An exploration of the forestry industry, the film depicts a variety of views on the conflict between logging and environmentalism, including those of loggers, alternative forestry practitioners, a vice-president of MacMillan Bloedel, First Nations elders and environmental activists.
In a number of interlocking episodes, five women weigh in on growing up in capitalism. Poetries of survival are interwoven with an adaptation of Mary Oliver’s iconic poem Wild Geese.
“My mother has been living with me and my teenaged daughter part time for the last year. When the pandemic hit we lost our personal support workers, and I found myself juggling caretaking, homeschooling and work. Because of Alzheimer’s, my mother’s mind is slowly departing, but her essence has not changed. Much of what she has been experiencing for years –profound disorientation, anxiety, mental fog–is what I was experiencing during isolation. With snippets of night time conversations and a stack of my drawings, I’ve created a sense of our world together — a world of overlapping thought, lapses, bent time, lost words, the absurd, and love.” – Heather Frise
