Lordville

Rea Tajiri, critically acclaimed director of History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (SFIAAFF '91) and Strawberry Fields (SFIAAFF '98), opens her new film with a question: What does it mean to own land? With the purchase of her house in Lordville, New York, Tajiri sets out to understand our relationship to place, but does so through the filter of experimental film language. Dziga Vertov, believing in cinema's potential to revolutionize our perception and relationship to the world, wrote in his infamous 1922 manifesto: “We believe that the time is at hand when we shall be able to hurl into space the hurricanes of movement, reined in by our tactical lassoes.” Through anecdotes from residents, an environmental scientist, and a Native American genealogist, Lordville reins in unusual stories buried within the everyday-powerful floods, ancestral secrets, and colonial violence-to probe the material and immaterial traces of a town's history. The film compels us into an act of listening and sensing that orients us toward the land that we have settled our being upon.

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