IMAGES ARTICLE - FINAL EDIT Jonathan Culp

This narrative - like many others - begins with Joyce Wieland.

A trailblazing filmmaker as well as visual artist, feminist, and nationalist, Wieland’s late-60s repatriation to Canada from New York City happened to coincide with a surge of excitement among Canada’s filmmaking community. With the formation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) and, later, the stimulus measures of the Capital Cost Allowance, cinema artists’ lobbying efforts finally seemed to be opening up new possibilities - a hope that Canada’s cinema culture might escape from under Hollywood’s colonial thumb.

Wieland was, if not the first, certainly the most noteworthy avant-garde filmmaker to venture into the world of Canadian feature narrative. Ambitious and meticulous, years in the making, exploiting some of the top cinema craftspeople in Canada’s film industry, The Far Shore (1976) appropriated and messed around with the genre of period melodrama, presenting a visionary allegory about the colonial subjection of women, creative artists, the natural environment, and ultimately the colonials themselves. The film became a much-admired touchstone for feminist film in Canada. But while the film is conceptually brilliant, it is also deeply flawed: the radical fusion of narrative and formalist cinemas was simply too ambitious to perfect on the first try. The wit and heart of the best scenes must contend with a lot of lifeless staging and static rhetoric, and the more daring formal inflections come so late in the film that they feel alienating and wrong - all of which contribute to a shapeless and sentimental climax. Worse, the experience was a lousy one for Wieland herself. Viewers didn’t get what she was trying to do, her attempt at self-distribution went nowhere fast, and ultimately the toll in time and money was disproportionate to the meagre rewards. She never made another film.

While her progression to feature work embodies a truism of artistic ‘progress’, the film hardly benefits by comparison with, for instance, her 1968 classic Rat Life and Diet in North America, which addresses related themes on a similar narrative arc, but in a miniaturized context whose modest rhythm and wit transforms both the rhetoric and the viewing experience. In following her ambitions into the struggle-laden arena of feature filmmaking, Joyce Wieland seemingly strayed from the things that made both her and her audience happy. Such tensions were - and remain - far from unique.

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That first moment of optimism didn’t last long. Those placating government policies soon revealed themselves as a violent and controversial reorientation: the Canadian film industry would tilt decisively toward the mythical spoils of a largely impenetrable American market, and creative priorities were subjugated to ill-conceived commercial stratagems. In this climate, the film scene split in two: the regimented, genre-biased film ‘industry’, and the independent, under-resourced film ‘community.’ Thus, by the late 70s, the CFDC’s Michael McCabe could announce that our national cinema was “essentially an export product”, bemoaning that “we hid behind our nationalism to protect mediocrity”; a couple years later,  avant-garde filmmaker R. Bruce Elder supplied the logical correlative via a compellingly dogmatic manifesto which condemned narrative itself as “the artistic structure of technocracy.”

The truth is that interesting, enduring work emerged from both camps - although it should be noted that the ‘community’ model achieved its ends with greater formal invention and no significant embezzlement of public resources. Still, the ideological bifurcation was damaging and nearly total: virtually the only significant interface between the solitudes during this time occurred as small-film artists took crew jobs on the feature film productions. This situation rested unchallenged until the late 1980s.

Enter the Ontario Film Development Corporation - a provincially-based variant on the federal agency, which had by now been re-christened Telefilm Canada. Toronto was by then the epicenter of both commercial and artistic cinema tendencies in Canada, and the provincial agency’s initial strategy sounded out an international audience for a cerebral, auteurist narrative cinema. The OFDC’s Big Three - Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Patricia Rozema - all produced feature work which was both artistically ambitious and reasonably accessible, and the critical response was enthusiastic. And while these particular filmmakers had never done much work outside non-narrative forms, their example inspired a new moment of optimism in the experimental film community. Independent filmmakers hoped to access the resources of finance and outreach that had been inaccessible to them for so long - while also enlarging their own expressive palates.

One of these artists was Midi Onodera, who after several years’ affiliation with the Funnel filmmakers’ collective had recently begun working as a camera assistant. With a decade of experimental filmmaking under her belt - culminating in Ten Cents a Dance (1985), a brilliant, austere panorama of sexual noncommunication in three ten-minute takes - Onodera saw firsthand the convergence of the solitudes. “Atom Egoyan was still just becoming a household name, Patricia had done I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing...so we met occasionally at different film festivals. And of course because i was working in the industry, I was exposed to that side of filmmaking too.” Having already displayed a near-chameleonic adaptability to new forms and techniques in her work, Onodera leapt into the world of narrative - first as screenwriter for a ‘multicultural’ CBC series called Inside Stories, then with a much more personal and ambitious feature project. Onodera’s aversion to the ingratiating conventions of identity-based queer cinema had already made Ten Cents a Dance into something of a mini-scandal, and her script for Skin Deep (1995) would extend the challenge. “I was very influenced by feminist new narrative cinema in the 80s...people really expected me to make lesbian content work, and I felt I didn’t want to be pigeonholed.” Setting out to explore “the continuity between sexuality and gender identity and how that works,” Skin Deep portrays an unprecedented panoply of overlapping gender performances and self-conceptions, in unvarnished human detail, with each group judging and misjudging the others and none idealized.

John Greyson also drew energy from the OFDC’s successes: “I was really inspired and optimistic - and probably a bit naive - in that late-80s moment...” Greyson had already been mounting his own queer challenge to cinema convention for most of that decade, and while he certainly courted contention with his subject matter, his most provocative incursions were formal. “I think coming of age as an artist in that moment of incredible ferment in the late 70s-early 80s - with the explosion of postmodern aesthetics and punk and new wave - brought with it ideas of quotation and hybridity and layering, and especially irony and camp and the sampling of pop culture.” While maintaining a torrent of short experimental work, Greyson’s reach and grasp led to a remarkably sustained engagement with feature narrative. Zero Patience (1993), Lilies (1995), The Law of Enclosures (2000) and Proteus (2003) each balanced his more cerebral tendencies against the narrative and production conventions of mainstream cinema, in an ongoing tug-of-war with an evolving balance of power.

Steve Sanguedolce had long since rejected the methods of the film industry, following an abortive college placement: “It’s like slave labor as far as I’m concerned.” His creative priorities took him in the opposite direction. “I learned how to mix so I could save money, I learned how to neg cut so I could save money, I learned how to do everything, cater, clean the toilets...” Still, he developed an ongoing working relationship with fellow experimentalist Mike Hoolboom, for whom he shot several films before collaborating on the shorts Mexico and Sweetblood - both of whose themes would be extended by Hoolboom’s script for Sanguedolce’s hour-long feature Away (1996). This project would elaborate his usual work methods, involving the oblique, intuitive collage of seemingly disparate elements: “We had my footage of my trip to Indonesia, and Mike knows my relationship with my twin brother, and then I had footage of my dad on The Price is Right, so Mike thought, how do I tie this in? And his idea was that these guys are going to work on Apocalypse Now, and it’s a Hollywood connection.” Fittingly, and for the first time in Sanguedolce’s work, this conception would interweave dramatic scenes, performed by professional actors, to shape the material into an identifiable - though far from conventional - narrative.

As an envoy of the same “Escarpment School” movement that spawned Sanguedolce, Richard Kerr’s spacious formal tendencies would seem the least adaptable to mainstream modes: “There’s no narrative films or fiction films in my canon,” he insists. And yet, upon leaving the Toronto film community to teach in Regina, even he found himself engaging in the world of feature film. Though Kerr had previously meditated on narrative techniques in such remarkable films as On Land Over Water (Six Stories), the main impetus for this engagement was circumstantial. “They’re just jumpstarting the Saskatchewan film industry - small place, right? But there’s a lot of money. Ironically I’m probably one of the more experienced filmmakers, but my interests are experimental films. My friends are Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage and Bruce Elder, you know? But a number of things coincided and the next thing I knew I was sort of intrigued by this challenge of accessing some of this bigger money.” The result was 1996’s The Willing Voyeur - an experimental-narrative hybrid of a singular temperament.

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Since the feature narrative model values planning over spontaneity, and tends to involve a much larger scale of material and human resources, the first obvious issue for these filmmakers lay in the modification of their accustomed working styles. How would they adapt?

Richard Kerr describes a friendly relationship with his Willing Voyeur co-author, Alan Zwieg; but for a filmmaker who identifies with the freedoms of the visual arts, the very presence of a script was in itself a challenge. (One wonders if Kerr even noticed Zwieg’s canny allusions to Citizen Kane.) “I had no sense of working with a writer, how that process was gonna roll out,” says Kerr, “and how a script would be translated into a schedule, which means you have to shoot that at that time. I’ve never worked that way before; the extreme opposite! I never had a clear understanding of how this was really gonna work, but just assumed, you know, if other people can do it, I can do it...and the first day of shooting the script was abandoned, essentially.” Similarly, though having rejected the mainstream’s governing hierarchies, Sanguedolce still had to deal with the specific demands of the form itself. “It was kind of tough just dealing with dramatic film. I’m not so good at visualizing the entire piece. Typically I’ve done the other approach of shoot first, ask questions later...just collecting a lot of images and then spending a lot of time cutting stuff, figuring out what it is, what you have, what the film’s about.”

Onodera’s television work, by contrast, had prepared her for the rigors of scriptwriting form. As an ambitious pragmatist, she came to Skin Deep with the deliberate intent of shaping her radically challenging material into something palatable to the mainstream industry - and quickly learned how difficult even a moderated intervention would be. “What I didn’t understand was how much compromising had to be done in order to play the game,” observes this quite uncompromising artist. “And I think I really really resisted that for so many years that it prevented me from going forward...I still didn’t have enough money to make the film, I didn’t have a Canadian distributor, so I couldn’t get into the doors of Telefilm. So it was either give back this (arts council grant) money, or just take a leap of faith, and just shoot it and try to do it and try to finish it.”

Greyson’s first feature, Zero Patience - midwifed by former OFDC director Alexandra Raffe - made no comparable concessions to the market. It retains his underground work’s basic formula, typically combining radical commentary on breaking social events, unifying character narrative, displaced interventions from unlikely historical figures, and one or the other variety of showbiz razzle-dazzle. And because it was conceived as a musical, the film had an inherent conditional discharge from the more limiting constraints of narrative. Still, while the conception was continuous, the transition to the new mode and scale of production brought its own difficulties. “in retrospect there were all sorts of flaws built into our process...We couldn’t build the scale of sets we needed to deliver production value, we couldn’t deliver the number of dancers necessary for the dance scenes, we couldn’t deliver the number of hours the choreographer needed. So there’s a weakness to the craft throughout it, which is really about my lack of experience working at that scale.”

Coming as he did from an artisanal background, Kerr was hypersensitive to the wastefulness of large-scale production. “It was nutty what they let me get away with, like taking a train with crew from Montana to Washington DC and back, you know? What a ridiculous concept! It cost $50,000 to do that run, and resulted in 4 minutes of screen time.” The methods of shooting with a crew were also an unfamiliar challenge: “I had a professional DOP for the first time, and he was great, but I realized I couldn’t deal with the actors or shooting if I wasn’t looking through the camera!”  Recalling the Skin Deep shoot, Onodera notes that “I didn’t quite gel with my cinematographer...he just couldn’t see what I was seeing” - the evidence of this disconnect is visible in the flatness of the film’s imagery. And, like Wieland, Onodera also had a more specific and wearying challenge to overcome: “It was a lot of male-dominated-world politics. It was really difficult because of the subject matter I was dealing with, because as a woman director you have to prove yourself about twenty more times than a man - on set, everywhere - and that has never changed. It took a lot of pushing and just absolute determination because there were just so many walls.”

Sanguedolce’s solitary work methods magnified his personal difficulties with the on-set dynamic, lamenting that “we gotta worry about lunch, all this stuff.” He expresses an ironic pride in his low-key approach to these scenes. “We shot it in three days. And they weren’t 20-hour days, I’m like, I wanna go home, you know, and fuckin’ sleep!” Understandably anxious to return to his established strengths, his impatience with dramatic method has visible consequences - the interactions of performers Earl Pastko and Babz Chula are so strictly functional as to appear perfunctory. (Of course, this calculated offhandedness is why Away feels continuous with Sanguedolce’s earlier work - it has the same feeling of unfinished exploration, of watching somebody think.) By contrast, while Kerr similarly “had no sense how to communicate with actors, to understand them, motivate them...I was just so clumsy,” in the end it hardly matters: his vision is so remote from the usual values of performative film that the quite functional cast are virtually reduced to plastics. Onodera took a much more serious and informed approach to her performers - she had minutely choreographed the movements and inflections of Ten Cents a Dance to compelling effect, and took from that experience an understanding that she needed to “take more control” of her actors on her feature set. Unfortunately, in a dialogue-heavy context that ranges from wisecracking comedy to high melodrama, the controlled performance style of Skin Deep feels achingly stilted; one longs for a sense of the characters’ inner lives.

Perhaps because he was the only one of these filmmakers granted more than one chance to get it right, Greyson grew into a different philosophy of performance. “I think that’s the toughest thing for writer-directors to let go of: thinking we know what our scripts are about. And the minute we do let go, we tend to let actors let us rethink who our characters are and their relationships onscreen.” While quickly disclaiming this observation’s exclusivity to “the vernacular of realism,” it is true that the declamatory camp performance style of Greyson’s more didactic works - Zero Patience and Uncut come to mind - can sometimes grow cloying if not exhausting in spite of the ever-present emotional resonances. His dramatic films peak when he is challenged by strong performers who bring their own strengths into harmonious balance with his own. Brent Carver’s work in Lilies is particularly brilliant in this respect, taking that film’s haute-camp emotionalism into an uncharted stratosphere; on the other end of the scale, Sean McCann’s humane crankiness is as powerful in The Law of Enclosures as he was as the best thing in Wieland’s The Far Shore. This kind of professional synergy is the best-case result of such hybrid filmmaking; if only the conditions for such interactions weren’t so impossibly rare.

Although their working methods are disparate, each of these filmmakers invested a great amount in post-production, often obsessively so. Like Sanguedolce, Kerr describes a free-form editing process that stretches over years: “I worked with someone who’s a professional editor today and this would have been her first feature, but she didn’t last long.” Clearly tensing against the limits of his footage, Kerr compensates with a remarkably dense onslaught of aural commentary that makes hash out of any conventionally linear reading of the film’s storyline.  In the end, the editing process didn’t end but was stopped. “The money ran out and the film had to be finished...I’ve always thought, if I had another couple weeks...” Onodera’s post-production work, meanwhile, placed remarkable emphasis on the voicings of Keram Malicki-Sanchez’s transgendered protagonist. “We went through extensive post-production work altering voice pitch line by line, making it deeper, making it higher; every single line of dialogue Keram spoke was altered.” And while Greyson’s feature narratives are distinctly premeditated, in their wake he has been as glad to return to “process-driven” work as the others. “Yes I have to do typical production planning and shooting to do the drama scenes, but with the doc stuff I’ll be right at the very end of the edit, still running out and shooting an extra interview, which happened in Fig Trees (2009) literally three days before we locked.”

Clearly, the demands of this mode of filmmaking are profound, especially for filmmakers with established personal styles. So why bother? One answer lies in the quest to bust out of the limits of the underground scene and reach a wider audience. Certainly Onodera had personal reasons to consider new audiences after film festival crowds afforded Ten Cents a Dance a memorably hostile reception. “My concept for Skin Deep structurally was to work really really within the conventions of narrative cinema, but with very unconventional content.” Only here lies another problem with the byways of feature production on any but the highest levels: you run the risk of history passing you by. By the end of Skin Deep’s seven-year gestation, the conventions themselves had transformed: “The Crying Game came out...and also Quentin Tarantino came on the scene which really disrupted the conventional structure of Hollywood narrative. Had I finished the film five years earlier, the timing would have been completely different.”

Less than shockingly, Greyson sees his engagement with audience as explicitly activist. “The mandates of entertain and agitate are both ones I value equally. We gather in the dark to share ideas and open us up to new worlds, and that’s why we go to movies as much as just to escape.” One feels this agenda shaping all his work in its various forms, feature and otherwise. But since he persevered longer and had greater success, Greyson got a privileged taste of the other way the activist agenda can be scuttled - by direct investor interference. The Law of Enclosures remains a powerful work in spite of its flaws, but it was a tipping point in Greyson’s tolerance for the mainstream work mode. “Telefilm was telling everybody they had to do genre, they had to do adaptation, there was much pressure to get an American star... I learned - you know, big surprise - doing what Telefilm encourages isn’t the best reason to do something. I blame myself completely, because I was the one who was buying in.” His unhappiness with such compromises reached its logical termination point as the ultimate nightmare of all creative filmmakers came true: “Funders in the edit suite telling you how to change your ending.”

Even without the strings of private investment, Sanguedolce has felt pressures from the audience directly. “The thing that I’m finding out is that people really like plot... In fact I got a critique in Seattle that Blinding (2011) had no plot. Like, is that a bad thing? Gimme a break!” Perhaps ironically, considering his complete disengagement from the industry apparatus, all of Sanguedolce’s hybrid films of the last decade - which also include Smack (2000) and Dead Time (2005) - have been feature length and storytelling-based, and he has returned repeatedly to working with actors - sometimes re-rendering the recorded interviews on which the films are based, and sometimes enacting their narratives within his lustrous hand-processed images. “I like the idea of being able to assign a face, connect emotionally with an actor or a figure on the screen, say this person is right here, and I think it’s more emotionally intimate, so that’s why I went with actors...but, frankly, I’d rather not shoot any human beings ever again.” This simmering tension between audience demands, responsibility to his human subjects, and personal creative preference infuses - and limits - all of Sanguedolce’s work from this period.

Only Kerr, bearer of the formalist standard, wholly dismisses audience as a consideration - though not without a sense of irony. “I worked in retail sales and all sorts of business as a teenager...so the idea of an audience to me is, you’re gonna make something and sell it, and you wanna sell a lot of it, so you can make money. If I’m gonna get up tomorrow and say I’m gonna make a film for an audience, I wouldn’t know what that means...so, what’s a guy with an attitude like that about audience doing making a feature film, that has investment money?” One imagines his funders did ask themselves just that question - while The Willing Voyeur’s polyphonic density makes for a compelling viewing experience, the narrative itself remains confoundingly elusive; certainly any but the most attuned mainstream audience would ask for another scant teaspoon of McCabe to season all that Elder.

And in the end, how much audience is our film industry capable of delivering, anyway?  Greyson spells out the ultimate truism of Canadian film: “The thing we do very badly is theatrical distribution. I mean, in some ways Telefilm’s no worse than many industries that are hugely subsidized like farming or mining, but when you look at it from the point of view of cultural dollars spent versus cultural dollars returned, it’s the worst business model ever.”

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These are far from the only Toronto-based filmmakers to attempt an engagement with the strangely separated universe of long-form narrative - other post-OFDC incursions were made by Peter Mettler as well as Mike Hoolboom himself, and in subsequent years such artists as Lisa Hayes, Helen Lee and Ruba Nadda all followed suit. What motivates such artists to continually climb back on to this dangerous electric horse?

Aspiring auteurs please note: it ain’t the money. Greyson, the most conventionally successful director on this list, observes that “it was always about donating the director’s fee in part or in whole back to the productions, to invest back in. Sometimes it would come back, sometimes it wouldn’t...It tended to cover the rent during the productions, but what was there on paper and what I actually got were always at odds.” Sanguedolce counts a single broadcast sale in 30 years, and that was complicated by the buyer going belly-up before he got paid. Skin Deep became a whirlpool of personal debt for Onodera, only breaking even with the eleventh-hour assistance of the National Film Board’s Studio D; she describes making the film as “one of the worst experiences of my life...it cost me my relationship at that time, almost destroyed me physically.” And although he professes to have been following the money, Kerr was hardly living the good life. “You’ve just been pulverized by this, right? it effects your health, it effects your job, because you’re doing two jobs.”

That second job is frequently located at film school - Greyson, Sanguedolce and Kerr all teach, and Greyson also served a fondly-recalled tour of duty as a television director-for-hire (“I never thought it had anything to do with my own work - it was a really fun way to pay the rent.”) On hiatus from personal filmmaking, Onodera fell into a long and fruitful partnership with Mac Cosmetics, producing promotional and training videos and stage shows, and in fact found more creative freedom and fulfillment in that role than she had in the feature film world - “It was like, ‘do what you want.’ Oh, okay!” Kerr places particular value on his education work, describing himself as a “teacher-practitioner” not an “artist”; he asserts that the main positive value of making The Willing Voyeur was pedagogical. “I no longer accepted scripts from students, I went right to an artisanal, studio practice teaching model, which I call the Look-Make-Learn-Teach cycle....I can clearly say to them with conviction and clarity, well this is how it works if you’re gonna make a feature film. This is what you’re gonna need, you know? You’re gonna have to learn to talk to lawyers. You’re going to have to feel the pressure of being in debt. You might have to sign a bank loan to put your house on the line. For what, for what? You wanna be famous and rich? I have no judgment there, that’s fine. Or do you want to be a poet? Two different realities. It’s probably misguided to think you’re going to be a poet and be famous.”

Thankfully, in spite of their tribulations, none of these artists have reenacted Joyce Wieland’s full retreat from filmmaking. Kerr has returned proudly to his practice of smaller experimental films - some of which, like the gorgeous Collage D’Hollywood, do reflect on his momentary engagement with the so-called mainstream. Onodera and Greyson have both sustained their short film practice while expanding into gallery-based video installations, and each have made periodic returns to long-format work on their own terms - “arts council features,” as Greyson names them. As fearless as ever, at this writing Greyson is preparing to lens a feature-length treatise on gay marriage and Israeli apartheid - “A real laugh-fest, and of course it’s super-commercial because penguins are involved. Naked penguins!” He is also getting to know the glories of Youtube - “to the chagrin of my distributor” - while Onodera spent 2011 creating her web-based ‘Frames Per Second’ project, a series of tiny films produced and viewable via iPhone. “I think that the whole concept of miniature cinema is something that’s been unexplored in so many areas,” says Onodera, “and it’s one that is affordable...I think the problem with a lot of filmmakers is that if you don’t produce a lot of work, let’s say you make a film every 2 years, there’s so much internal pressure on you that in some ways you don’t have fun.”

Sanguedolce - who typically spends five years making each of his films - is more skeptical about his place in the web video universe: “If you’re making meditative or contemplative work, good luck.” He expresses frustration over the paucity of ongoing local support for his work (“I never really made it for an audience, but it hurts not having an audience, it’s a dumb thing”) and justly laments the direct material obstacles to his work methods as film stocks and toners are taken off the market. While steadfastly following his muse against the prevailing currents, Sanguedolce suggests that he may be on the verge of his own, latter-day creative transition. “Maybe it’s about coming out of the basement, out of the studio, say okay now I’m going to collaborate and just make filmmaking fun...I like the notion of maybe being a little more public in my own life. It’s got nothing to do with cinema, but it would help, you know?”

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That OFDC moment is fading into memory now, and Greyson has seen the change in his classroom. “I think for a while the Telefilm ladder was really the dominant - seemingly only - route, but there’s a new generation who has grown up on Youtube and the internet, and their relationship to new media is very different and distinct and confident. I think Telefilm will have a long way to scramble to catch up.” And so the realities of accessible and affordable technology have created a new moment of optimism, one which challenges the relevance of artist-run culture as well as Telefilm. For every generic ‘calling card’ production, there are ten unconstrained adventures by people with no affinity to any cinematic community, and the sense of possibility has led to successful video explorations by visual artists (Margaux Williamson’s Teenager Hamlet), novelists (Jim Munroe’s collectively-directed Ghosts With Shit Jobs) and myriad others. While the structural changes this dynamic implies remain elusive, the easing of boundaries and opening of options has had a salutary effect. Daniel Cockburn’s You Are Here (2010) is evidence of this - a successful narrative-experimental hybrid which was actually not a nightmare to produce.

Not that Cockburn was immune to all the familiar challenges, as he transposed his gamey, cinema-obsessed aesthetic to the feature model. “I think when I was first writing it I was like, oh maybe this can be me and a few friends really guerrilla-style. But once things actually started to happen I realized - no, this is going to require a team. This is going to be a little society for several weeks devoted to the act of making this thing, and I’m going to have to be very pro-active and very leader like, and so in that sense it was everything I had been working for 8 years to avoid!” In a happy turn of events, the crew - perhaps acclimatized to the new world of democratized access, perhaps just a lucky fit - spoke his language and had his back. “Pretty much all of the key creatives on set understood that I was a first-time director - in that sense of the word - and so they really facilitated...if it became apparent that I was faltering in some way or unsure about something, they’d really be there with suggestions or to sort of steer me.”

Where Cockburn tends to (charmingly) occupy the center of his short videos - as performer as well as maker - here his conundrums are interpreted by actual actors, with the late Tracy Wright at the emotional center as a media collector whose archive gets the best of her. “I was worried that I was going to have to micromanage every little bit of performance and talk people through; then I realized oh, she’s already done the work, the character is built.” In fact, working with the performers brought out things that Cockburn didn’t know were there. “It took several years from conception to completion, and I know that I myself went through a number of personal changes in that time...a lot of the problems that I thought were purely mental problems and issues were actually connected to emotional stuff. So I think, strangely, the movie’s making took place over the course of this awareness of myself, and I think maybe they fed into each other. And then the involvement of these other human beings gave it shape, so that then, over time, I could see this material and realize what was underneath it.”

As formally unique as his short work, yet betraying his early schooling in smart-ass narrative avatars like Hartley and Jarmusch, Cockburn was sensitive to the project’s potential impact on its audience - “I don’t like the idea of making something in a vacuum” - and, in screening You Are Here, found that “people are responding to it in more ways than purely intellectually, they’re engaging with something more emotional or human or evocative.” An adventure in feature narrative that is both non-oppressive and a source of actual spiritual insight and growth is, indeed, cause for optimism. Let’s hope this phase sticks around a while.