Lucas’s task of documenting and maintaining the island never ends, and the longer the film goes on the more Sisyphean her task appears, as she tries to limit the impacts of plastic pollution on her island’s inhabitants. But the deeper you look, the more beauty there is to be found, and Geographies of Solitude encourages you to look very deeply indeed. Under different circumstances Sable Island could look extremely forbidding and inhospitable, with its beaches often buffeted by north Atlantic winds that disturb the ever-shifting sands. The sound design is equally impressive, with a tactile aesthetic that relishes the natural grittiness of Sable. Otherwise, the whole film was shot on 16mm often using macro lenses to get some beautiful close ups of the local flora and fauna, and there’s as much here to delight aficionados of analogue filmmaking as lovers of the natural world. This results in a film wonderfully soundtracked by the footsteps of beetles and the ECG of snails and including impressionist montages created by exposing film to starlight and sea spray and developing it in fluid extracted from yarrow and seaweed. Lucas is accompanied in these endeavors by her documentarian Mills, whose appreciation for Lucas and her work inspires similar inquiries on her end, exploring different ways of creating sounds and images for the film that originate from the island. Having arrived many years earlier to document the progress of the island’s horse population, Lucas has settled there and added combing the beach for plastics, collecting invertebrate samples, and otherwise sustaining and promoting the island’s health to her remit. Along with the film’s director, editor and cinematographer Jacqueline Mills, our guide to the island is its guardian of many decades and sole resident Zoe Lucas, a naturalist researcher who has been documenting and one might say, gardening, the island for over thirty years. Geographies of Solitude-which I seem pathologically incapable of typing without adding an “r” to today-uses experimental techniques of sound and film development to ingrain the viewer in the miniscule rhythms of life and death on Sable Island off the Eastern coast of Canada. This is a wet autumn afternoon movie and luckily, I had a wet autumn afternoon to watch it on. This year the program includes a pair of music documentaries on the roots of Techno and the story of the UK soul band Cymande, a naturalist document on the ecosystem of Sable Island, a biographical tribute to the Godfather of Avant-Garde cinema, and the surrealist Franco-Italian drama Leonora Addio. The “Create” segment of the London Film Festival is devoted to showcasing the creative process through features and documentaries exploring the lives and works of artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians.
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