Films from around the world and the southwest will be featured in the inaugural Gila Time-lapse Film Festival to be held September 24 – 27 in Silver City, New Mexico.
Desert Flower, filmed in Joshua Tree National Park, Jewel of the Dolomites filmed in northern Italy, and Light Study from Canada are just a few of the films to be screened.
The Gila Time-lapse Film Fest is part of the 11th Gila River Festival, a yearly event that celebrates the Gila River, New Mexico’s last wild river. Selected films will be screened throughout the four-day event.
Additionally, the Gila River Festival is pleased to announce that critically acclaimed film maker, Godfrey Reggio, will deliver the festival keynote address, entitled “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.” Reggio’s ‘Qatsi trilogy,’ and three short programs of selected time-lapse films submitted as part of the Gila Time-lapse Film Fest will also be shown.
Godfrey Reggio is an inventor of a film style that creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact. He is prominent in the film world for his ‘Qatsi Trilogy,’ essays of visual images and sound that chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment. His other films include Songlines, Anima Mundi, Evidence, and Visitors.
Born in Louisiana, Reggio spent 14 years in a Roman Catholic religious order, living in community, dedicated to prayer, study, and teaching, before spending the 1960s in New Mexico as a teacher and community organizer. In the 1970s, he co-founded the non-profit Institute for Regional Education, and co-organized a multi-media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior.
The Gila Time-lapse Film Fest will also feature Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva. In the introduction to his films, Paatuwaqatsi-H2opi Run to Mexico, Time Keepers-Calendario Desconocido, and Color of Wilderness, Masayesva will speak about several converging topics: the spirituality of water, indigenous communities’ relationship to time, calendars, and environmental discord. He’ll discuss humane approaches to technology, with a keen awareness of their impacts on human societies, including the Hopi people.
Masayesva has curated programs and been a resident artist at several art centers, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a guest artist and juror at film festivals in many countries, and his films are available in several languages. Masayesva continues to reside in the village of Hoatvela in Arizona.
Time-lapse filmmaking has become quite popular in the past decade. In the early 1980’s, Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” introduced audiences to the intense satisfaction derived from the compression of time. Today, time-lapse films can be seen at the start of news broadcasts, the intro title sequences of films and TV shows such as House of Cards, and integrated into narrative and non-narrative works.
Time-lapse films allow our human perceptions to stretch as we observe changes on the land that we otherwise would not as we go about our quotidian pursuits. We find time-lapse films to be instructive and fulfilling because they can compress a day, a month, a year into a short burst of film that we can perceive in an instant. Time-lapses show us that the world at different timescales is very strange, and much different than our everyday experience: it’s vibrating, buzzing, and moving. By viewing processes we take for granted at different timescales, we hope to change how we interact with the great natural forces that surround us, and find our society’s balance anew.
The Gila Time-lapse Film Festival is directed by WNMU Professor of New Media Peter Bill, and will be hosted at Western New Mexico University’s new digital cinema, Light Hall. Peter has been shooting time-lapse films since living in Prague at the height of the Prague Spring of the ’90s. He moved into time-lapse filmmaking as he was a plein air painter, capturing the movement of light with his brush. Starting with super-8 film, and moving to digital means, Peter’s time-lapse films have exhibited internationally and won many awards.
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For more information on the 11th Annual Gila River Festival, visit www.gilaconservation.org