Dawnland
8’48” // documentary // 2021

One way to inquire into what a particular culture overlooks is to look at its art and ask: what is background? In film, background is more or less synonymous with setting, environment, place. Place is where the action happens. Place is where the characters are located, their words exchanged, their dramas witnessed. Place itself is never given a chance to take place.

This film was made during the COVID pandemic, a strange time of great unravelling. What can we do from within crisis? In times of falling apart, it is in the overlooked, the seemingly invisible, the presumed-to-be-mute, that home can be made. Dawnland is a recognition that the Earth is Home and Song; Dawnland is a celebration of place; Dawnland speaks to a desire for World: World that is here, now, singing loud and clear amidst the end of civilization, the destruction of the known, the dissolution of myths of progress that no longer serve life and death.