Talking the Fire Out

Recently on view at MassArt x SoWa Gallery, Fitchburg State’s Media Wall, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Winner of “Outstanding Worcester Short” at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival.

Imbued with grief, family, religion, and post-traumatic stress, the center of this essay film is landscape. Shot almost entirely outdoors, bouncing between towns in central Massachusetts and the western edge of Pennsylvania, this film aims to interrogate the various meanings a place can hold along with the marks it, and we, leave behind. More than what is said or seen, each space we inhabit becomes imbued with our own subjectivity. In this piece the camera lens becomes a tool of excavation, turning over thoughts and emotions to shine a light into the murky nature of memory and memorial to craft a narrative that is both revealing and withholding, marinating not just in the aesthetics of these places but the ghosts which have been left behind through loss and trauma. At its core are two questions; how do we grieve for someone we did not fully know, and to what extent does trauma isolate us from ourselves and our past?