Synopsis
An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogs the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie skies a visceral, personal encounter is revealed in the solace of open space.
A word from Tënk
Clicks and clacks of a film being wound. Or is it an old front door creaking in the breeze ? Radio waves flowing through the air, bouncing off fields, the big sky, barbed-wire fences. Colliding with the solid wall of an abandoned house. Or did it pass right through ? How far have these voices travelled ? Now. The hand of a young man placing photos of people eternally younger, eternally older than himself. Then. In this short film Ghosts and Gravel Roads, Mike Rollo succeeds in traversing great expanses by finding poetry in the document, making solid the evaporated past and collapsing the solidity of the present. Both lyrical and formal, this work encounters the landscapes of the Canadian prairies as they both preserve and erode the memories and histories that have been set adrift upon them.
Benjamin R. Taylor
Director and programmer, VISIONS
Cofounder of La lumière collective
