Synopsis
There is no one who has nothing to say about love. “Stalking Love” is a feature documentary in which a single camera traverses North America to peer into the hearts of individuals from all walks of life. From across Canada, the US, and Mexico, a colourful tapestry of humanity is woven. The human relationship to “love” is explored through the perspectives of a sex worker in Montreal, an unhoused man in New York City, a preacher in Savannah, a businessman in San Blas, and a myriad of others. In this dreamlike journey across the North American landscape, Stalking Love weaves together seemingly dissimilar realities by exploring an issue to which every person on earth can relate. No one can speak about love without giving themselves away. It is a property of love that it unveils the most essential in all humans. Stalking Love sings the harmony and the discord, too, between humans in our society as they muse on the topic of love.
A word from Tënk
One might be led to believe that this film is about love. Perhaps it’s the title that drops the hint.
But since love is a feeling that takes root and uproots itself only to transplant itself, a being that is neither animal nor vegetable, a microorganism that colonizes bodies and that may sometimes seem either incurable or to confer upon the body an unusual musculature–well, it is to those bodies that we must pose the questions, because in order to track down this mythical pull called love, it is necessary to scrutinize the spaces it inhabits.
This film, then, is less about love as it is about the people in whom it takes root. And since, in talking about love, people, in fact, talk about themselves, we find ourselves transported across a series of portraits, a narrative in motion, a sort of van der Keuken of contemporary America.
And it’s precisely there, before this humanistic approach that asks what is love, that we remember the construction and codes of this transcendental state.
This unpretentious, collaged work is guided by the filmmaker’s raw relationship with the documentary material and her direct approach, attuned to the array of colours of love that live in each human she encounters. The voice of the filmmaker-cum-confidante, whose presence is felt behind the camera, doesn’t hesitate to evoke her protagonists’ stories about their experiences, and with this guidance, they enter into all sorts of vulnerabilities that seem almost funnily accessible. Perhaps this is because she films them all with such simplicity: alone and disguised as travelogue.
Gabrielle Ouimet
Tënk's Artistic Director
