Anna Roberts-Gevalt

Animated clay paintings tell the true story of the last house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay, a large and important estuary and waterway in Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States. In an Old-Time Music ballad, the house sings of its life and the creatures it has sheltered during its lifetime journey from tree, to timber, to home, to an ultimate return to nature. It contemplates time, environmental change, and the rise of the seas.

Circling around two figures -- a New England housewife, the wisher -- and a character in a more mythic waiting space, perhaps collecting all the wishes -- the film considers the potential power in the wishes of those waiting for the war to end. Created with support from Smithsonian Folkways, it is an imaginative exploration into how we engage with the dreams of the past. "In 1941, Vermonter Helen Hartness Flanders visited the home of Margaret Shipman, an octogenarian living with her sisters in the small town of Lee, MA to ask her to sing any old songs she knew, for her recording machine. Margaret, a woman with a beautiful, understated voice, delivered a song with a simply voiced wish for the end of all wars -- “Oh, if i were queen of france, or still better pope of rome I’d have no fighting men abroad, nor weeping maids at home All the world should be at peace and the might should be the right I’d have those that made the quarrelling, the only ones to fight”

A queer fungal spirit leads participants through VR scenes inspired by mushroom reproduction, blending science and sensuality to explore connections between humans and nature's hidden desires.