Kickstarter

Rainforest: a dancetheater film set in the Great Bear Rainforest, near Kitimat BC. 

• A meditation on the psychological shift that happens with simple, quiet experience of wild places
• A visceral experience of pristine landscapes of the largest temperate rainforest left on the planet

Directed by Karl Frost of Body Research in collaboration with LA film-maker John Zibell

With performers Kevin Dockery (California), Scott Davis (Washington/Alaska), Izumi Shin-Ra (Japan/Alberta), Nicole Casado (California), Hailey McCloskey (British Columbia), Jordan Stout (California), and Jote Mahern (California)

www.bodyresearch.org/rainforest

Hi!       

We’ve got this really amazing film project that we need your help with! 

The film is a meditative art experiment, meant to evoke that sense of psychological shift that happens with quiet time in nature. Both the subject matter and the rules of filming are intended to evoke the kind of calm and simplicity of presence that opens up the senses to what David Abrahams calls the ‘more-than-human’ world.  It is also intended to bring a visceral sense of connection to a pristine (and, for most people, remote) wilderness area: The Great Bear Rainforest of BC, Canada, the largest temperate rainforest left on the planet.  This is a magical part of our planet that few people know about.  It is also a part of the world that people are starting to become aware of as Harper’s government in Canada plans the Enbridge Oil Pipeline to bring Tar Sands Oil from Alberta out to the Pacific through this forest and to currently protected marine areas.

We need your help in making this film happen!

For many years, I've lead wilderness trips through the Dancing Wilderness Project, “an ongoing project investigating the interconnections of body-based creative process, wilderness experience, and how we choose to live our lives.” Central to my passion in facilitating these trips is the desire to share the kind of shift in consciousness that can occur when we allow our hyper-active city minds to become quiet in the presence of a world less controlled by humans. Rainforest is a meditative art experiment intended to evoke this experience in viewers.

Both the content and form of the film will reflect this sense of opening up of the senses through deliberate simplicity. Inspired by the rules of Dogma films, we will be following a set of simple rules.  Call them the…

‘Anti-Adventure Film’ rules

• Calm action. (We aren’t trying to achieve the technically near impossible, but reflect the simple and accessible experience of the body in nature)
• No acting, no pretending, just filming people in experiences unmediated by social mask or artifice
• Simple camera use (no zooming, no panning, only still camera frame)
• No words
• Calm editing (no jump cuts, only slow cross fades)
• No added sound, voice over, or soundtrack beyond the sounds of the environment.

It is an art experiment reflecting the stretching out of time that can happen in looking out over a body of water, hearing wind in the trees, or feeling the sun or rain on the skin. It is a prolonged meditation on ‘being there’. See the web link for more details on the filming and editing rules.

The project crew is assembling in Vancouver, BC on August 13. From there, we’ll drive the Body Research bus  20 hours up to Kitimat, where we will be based during the two weeks of filming. Once we return to civilization, film maker John Zibell and I will sit down to 2 marathon weeks of film editing in LA in order to have the film ready by the September 15 submission deadline for the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, the first of several festivals to which we will be submitting the film. All of the artists are donating their time. Your donations go to helping us carry out the project with things like transportation, video equipment for wet conditions, editing facility use, backpacking gear, and food for the crew for 2 weeks.

The film is not a didactic film on the environmental issues of the oil pipeline, the risks of the oil tanker traffic through these biologically rich marine protected zones.  Many other projects are rising to this call (see the web site for links).  The film is instead intended to simply and wordlessly share a sense of place, a sense of embodied experience of the rainforest.  It is both about the effects of time away from hyper-stimulation from the human and specifically about the body and the self in this particular, amazing landscape and set of ecosystems. We hope that viewers will emerge from the film not just knowing intellectually about the place via words like “rainforest” or “wilderness”, but really ‘feeling’ something of the place.

The film is not a ‘safe bet’ kind of film, following a familiar rubric of a successful film.  It’s more of a leap of faith, a big experiment to create a very new kind of film.  I have a lot of faith in the Rainforest film project coming out of my years of experience with the Dancing Wilderness Project and with the ‘test-of-principle’ film experiments we did last year in Yolo County, California, but we are in many ways moving into relatively uncharted film territory.

We hope that you are intrigued by the film proposal and that you will help support our project! (check out the many donor perks...)

Thanks so much!

Karl Frost, director of Body Research