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A montage of beautifully stark black-and-white
images, "Foster Island" summons to mind the Russian
film "The Return"....One of the few festival films
awake to cinema’s expressive possibilities, "Foster
Island," in just under seven minutes, is
magnificent.
N.P. Thompson, Movies into Film
Plays like the last few minutes of Michelangelo
Antonioni's "L'eclisse" (a series of images haunted
by absence).
Kathy Fennessy, SIFFBlog 2005
CREDITS
Original music by Jeff Greinke (included in
Greinke's CD
Soundtracks)
Post production services by Alpha Cine (35mm blowup)
& Forde Labs
Andy Pratt Negative Cutting & Conforming
Titleworks/Dean Martinson
Major funding by 4Culture (King County Cultural
Development Authority)
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
"Foster Island" was inspired by New York
filmmaker Peter Hutton's workshop in 2002 at
Seattle's Northwest Film Forum. Peter's
beautifully composed, meditative landscape films can
best be described as paintings that move in
time. I was particularly struck by his use of
black and white reversal film to create fine-grain,
high-contrast, sometimes abstract images.
I had
previously made an urban montage ("Flow," 1999), but
conversations with Peter inspired me to adopt some
of his techniques to create a new portrait of
Seattle that focused more on the natural environment
that so powerfully dominates the character and
manmade features of the city.
The
narrative thread in "Foster Island" is thin and
allusive. The camera eye takes us through a
wetland that is revealed to be under a freeway
leading to the city. The city itself is empty,
haunted. We descend from the skyscrapers to a
stream in the middle of the city, where old
photographs float by, images that people have left
behind. My intent is to provoke thoughts about
what is transient and what is eternal in our city.
Andy Goldsworthy has said: "A landscape doesn't have
to involve land. Time is a landscape."
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