Earth Day Screenings with Celebration of the Arts at Eastern Illinois University

PROGRAM 2: THE ENVIRONMENT WHICH SURROUNDS US from Flaherty on the Road

Coal Spell 
(China, 2008, 8 min.)
Director: Sun Xun

For Sun Xun, to erase is just as important as to draw. His work as an animator is not so different as that of a historian. And Sun’s work is very concerned with history and myths, especially with regards to how they interact. Adding to the process of drawing/erasing, Coal Spell also employs the use of found footage as traces of the past, for markers of events within history or mythology.

River Rites
(USA, 2011, 12 min.)
Director: Ben Russell

Russell takes his transcendent cinema to new heights with this amazing short documentary which transforms an idyllic riverside scene of a group of Saramaccan Maroon children playing and washing in the river into a sort of sacred animist rite. Features a superb noise-metal soundtrack from Mindflayer.

Three Men and a Fish Pond
(Latvia, 2008, 52 min.) Latvian with English Subtitles
Directors: Laila Pakalnina & Māris Maskalāns

A film on the celebration of life beyond violence, predation, and death. In her director’s note for Doc Alliance Films, Laila Pakalnina herself has said that “perhaps this film is rather very simple instead of very complicated—about our physical and spiritual understanding of the world simultaneously. It is about the fact that there are people. And also birds, and fog, the sun, night and so on. That everything exists.” But beneath that apparently simple and calm surface runs an undercurrent of film history and vital knowledge. On the first issue, we can find here references from Charlie Chaplin to Sergei Eisenstein, or from Soviet rural drama to a “Flahertynian” exploration of the relationship of characters and landscapes; on the second, a profound depth of understanding the circle of life and death as dramatic but also joyful. The film’s simplicity is an achievement very few have: unpretentious, humoristic, respectful of her characters, but also of the animals, plants, and even objects, all part of the same universe.