sieve - slow sifting

editing my short film has been hard. i have always been a harsh critic of the contours of my face and the broad sway of my gait, so hours of footage with an abundance of both has been an emotional trial. the first day i began sifting through the footage, one of my best friends, sitting on an adjacent couch, watched me writhe inside, trying my hardest not to feel the restless shame coursing through me. it had already held me back for months, but i still couldn't avoid it. and even with that first victory over inertia, it's taken me more than a month to fully step back into the project again. a month of avoidance and distraction. a month of sitting and mulling about it in the back of my mind. but not actually looking at it. not actually doing it.

until today. 

at the gentle promptings of another friend currently walking the hard road of a passion project of his own, this morning found me at my desk with the project hard drive. finally. and it was still hard, but a little easier than last time. and after a half an hour of enforced focus, i set my alarm for 20 minutes and vowed i wouldn't check in on facebook, email, or my phone until the buzzer set me free. but it only took me another few minutes until i found the below frame and suddenly felt....

felt a lot. 

something new and exciting and confident, and an amazement pure and full: these are my features, this is my face, but where did the purpose come from? the fierceness? and what about those lines? the life and stillness of the frame as a whole, it swooped me up and carried me along until i realized lines and phrases and editing choices were scattering themselves into notes on a page. today is the day a new life began for this project and i'm not exactly sure where it will take me. 

in the meantime, i'm very grateful to my two andrews, one my collaborator and the other my guardian angel to this project.

bayou la batre {in photos}

here is the collection of production and location photos from sieve this past week. two days of driving. four days of shooting. six days of living a dream together with someone who believes in it as well.

it hurt going through the photos on the plane, feeling like i had left behind this new way of life that is exhausting yet so fulfilling, feeling like i had misplaced something important {where is the dodge journey? where is andrew? where is all the film gear?}...but none of that is true. this is just the beginning. everything is laying out in front of me faster than i can imagine. my only job is to put one foot in front of the other, keep grounded, stay centered & trust in myself and my worth no matter what.



p.s. all these photos are mine except the one where you can see my hands {that would be a neat trick}. that one is andrew newton's, my dp extraordinaire {pictured}.

in production

i have no words to spare at the moment, so i give you images.

here

i am here, less than five miles from my childhood home: that small, beaten house that was the first place i lived in this world. my life began there. my memories. my first words. i was given my first book there wrapped up under the christmas tree; saw the moon through my grandfather's telescope there out in the front yard with all the weeds.

and now there is here again and the three of us, myself, my memories, and my home, meet again to compare notes on what exactly we each have experienced in the eighteen years since we were all in one place together.

i have the hardest job of the three. the other two just have to show up and show themselves off. me, i have to work, to write, to perform and construct. assemble the piece converging into a story worth telling. a story with meaning. a story with beauty and truth.

and as much as i fear there is no possible way i can create a net of words and images big enough to contain what will happen here, i know in fact, my job is actually the same as theirs: all i have to do is show up. the words and ideas are already here, standing at attention, waiting patiently for me to look back at them as i sift and sieve through this world i am navigating. and so far, my memories are generous in return, loaning out freely from the vaults of my childhood so i can admire the patina added from the tender care of my later selves, polishing my young understanding of the world during the past two decades.

already i am filled.

driving through mobile tonight was surreal. the darkness of 9pm obscuring things i might otherwise remember, but even so, familiarity curled around details. moffett road. bel air mall {which i knew was coming long before the sign announced itself}. winn dixie. padgett switch road. half mile road. two mile road. mostellar medical center {where my blood was drawn on my birthday only a few weeks shy of exactly 24 years ago}.

the most haunting of all was a mysterious building with two white silo-like towers. the writing on them didn't make sense to my sleep deprived and road-tired brain and as i peered at them trying to place what they were for and whether or not i recognized them, i felt the curious gaze of a child step into my body as a sense memory returned. i feel the boredom of being in a car, unable to make sense of this building and strange letters all belonging to a foreign adult world. and as i drove onward tonight, wondering if the memory was real or imagined, i realized it didn't matter if i actually ever stared at that particular building. the truth of the moment, the truth that came surging back to me while passing this one building, that wash of curiosity and loneliness and awareness of the adult world around me, that was real. that was an undeniable marker of my childhood. and, here, tonight it was given back to me in full color and surround sound. and for now, that is enough.

tomorrow, the first thing we film is my home at 33 adams street.

i can hardly believe it: i am here.

the story of sieve

i'm reposting a piece i wrote a year ago because it's the back-story to sieve.

it explains the moment the short film project began and the surge of responses that welled up in the wake of its conception. despite a year passing the story is still current. the thoughts, fears, hopes, excitement–all are still relevant.

and here we are.

in a week's time, i'll be in dallas, finalizing the script and packing up the car with andrew, ready to depart for bayou la batre, alabama the next morning. tuesday, october 2nd.

{and a small plug because i have not yet mentioned it here, we are very close to having our project funded, so if you are so moved to contribute and help out, the kickstarter link is here. there was such an overwhelming response to the kickstarter campaign that i went ahead and dove right in and bought the flight southbound.}

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a week ago, a facebook friend messaged me late at night. and when i say friend, i mean he’s more of an acquaintance, the older brother of a classmate in college. a good guy, really, but no one i’ve ever spilled my guts to or gone out of my way to spend time with. no, more just someone i’ll laugh with when i travel to see his sister, a passing friend who’s “sunset a day” photo series i’ve been admiring from afar all year via said facebook. 

we all have these kinds of friends, collecting them in mass quantities, shuffling through their updates about what boring thing they ate, what boring thing their dog or baby or friend’s friend did, whining about how boring it is yet doing it compulsively all the same. it’s inane, i know, but the only reason i subscribe to this use of technology is because of photographic works like this "friend", andrew, has been displaying all year, but even more so for the magical moments of connection like the one i’m going to tell you about. it was the kind of magic where a simple late night question “are you back in seattle yet?” lead, in less than 5 minutes, through a series of the twists and turns of meandering late night conversation, to the confession of a driving desire on my part to go down to alabama to create a piece about memory, family history, time and place. 

and then, the critical moment happened when this man, this person i can count on one hand how many times i’ve hung out with, offers to come and document the project. and then, when i ask if he’ll help me make the short film i didn’t really realize i had been trying to figure out to make until just that moment, he even manages to get excited about it even more. giddy. the two of us typing away enthusiastically into the wee hours of the morning, andrew completely unaware of the emotional breakdown i had earlier that evening watching the last harry potter movie {sappy but true}, seeing the entire magical community mobilize behind one person, tears streaming down my face realizing that i want that experience of people believing in me so much they would die for me, then simultaneously realizing in the flash of an epiphany that i crave that belief from others because, dammit, I don’t believe in myself! and then fastforward back to the present moment, me at a keyboard, a mere hour or two later, being given the gift of this one person’s belief and commitment and oh-my-gosh-i-don’t-think-i-can-sleep kind of excitement in me and my project and my vision.

after waiting 18 years to return to my childhood home and 6 years to make a piece of artwork about it, everything is happening and happening with the ease that synchronicity brings {that’s not going to be a problem, nathania, i have all the equipment i need sitting 5 feet from my body}.

so here i stand, suddenly at the precipice, looking forward to this place i have been looking back to for so long. and let me tell you, it’s a scary precipice. because all that longing, all that patina of loving polish and care i have added to all the memories i have maintained over the years, all those things i cared for and have contemplated for many years that may no longer exist, or even worse, exist still but so changed as to feel defiled--all those things might be taken away, violated or not as i recall them to be.

and as the time and space between me and bayou la batre, alabama compresses, gets smaller, the anticipation is often overwhelming and i feel the pressure building, the hope and memory and excitement and inevitable disappointment already converging until all i can do is breathe. breathe. breathe.

breathe space and air and light and life into the memories i do have, take them out and look at them one by one before having them irrevocably changed by the reality of what these places look like now. because 18 years in geographic time has passed, where a town was built up by the tourism surrounding the placement of bubba gump shrimp company smack dab in the center of town {even though it wasn't actually filmed there}, bringing interest and wealth to a town that probably deserved neither, to the violence of katrina who ravaged more than just new orleans, and especially to the uncontrollable yet gentler forces of time and change.

and on top of all that there is 18 years of personal time, of me growing up, becoming an adult, seeing and feeling the world from 3 feet taller and decades older all the while hording the memories i had of this sleepy little town in the south that inhabited me more than i inhabited it as a 3^rd culture kid, never speaking the southern language of mooobeal {mobile} and the bi-youuu {bayou}, never eating the southern diet of everything fried in two inches of bacon fat and never really understanding the southern mentality of “traveling a ways” meaning going to the next zipcode.

but the south, it has always lived in me in ways i can’t fully understand even as an adult. maybe because it was the most reliable way of feeling beauty and connection from within a family with three older siblings who would really rather not have anything to do with their littlest sister, a mother too spaced out to mediate and a father too imbalanced, fighting the world, fighting his wife, fighting his children and most of all fighting himself, where i was perpetually submerged in that feeling of loneliness that was more of a chronic disease than a passing emotion. the kind of loneliness that comes from feeling so small and separate in such a big world. a feeling i find kind of ironic since as an adult woman i can’t seem to get over how big I am. 

so where could i turn to but the south? the spanish moss laden trees passing by outside the open window of our car, the yellow wash of light soaking the faded fabric of our living room, the louvers of the windows that we would hastily close each night the bug sprayers would sweep through the area, the pungent yet sweet and horribly toxic smell they would leave behind that i would drink in to saturate my vivid childhood senses. the jeweled crimson of magnolia seeds. the gentle chime of the draw bridge being brought back up that i would strain to catch the first sign of each time--these images sink deeper into the spirit than i fully know how to go, pumped with life by the thready pulse of my memory that so lovingly crafts the experience each time i draw them up and back into me. and it worries me that i have instilled in myself a confidence in my memory, not for the methodic memorization of numbers and words, though i’m not all too shabby at that, but for that visual and sense memory, of knowing a place i have been to only once and years ago at that.

what if i go now and it is not how i remembered it not because it’s changed, but because my memory failed?

so i ask myself now: how do i let go of what i know or think i know? how do i come to this place open hearted and free? because whether or not i want to, i come burdened with an abundance of nostalgia. but not the sweet kind of nostalgia, cloying and untrue, no, this is not the saccharine variety but rather the sacrificial. the kind of nostalgia that churns up dark waters, where everything that has been lost or taken or forgotten washes up in its wake to be burned as an offering for all that is to come. because as much as i go down there for the past, for what was and what has been, to honor and name it, present it in vivid colors, i am here to discover what it holds for the future, to see how it lives on in my life as it is happening right now and how that will all grace what is to come.