Deep 1 (2023)

Deep 1
Deep 1 (14:30, 2023)

Filmed over 2 years (2020-2022), at home and away, Deep 1 is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed and decayed with hyacinth and lichen extract. Winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Filmed in Mount Forest, Ontario and Dawson City, Yukon.  *available on digital & on 35mm

Analogica Festival, Bolzano, Italy 2024                                                  Playhouse Theatre, Hamilton, Ontario 2024                                              Prismatic Ground Film Festival New York 2024                        Shapeshifter Cinema, Oakland 2024                                                            Simon Fraser University, Vancouver 2024                                              Adhoc, Innis College Toronto, 2024                                                      Revolutions Per Minute Film Festival, Harvard U, Boston 2024            Ann Arbor Film Festival 2023, USA; Jury Award                                              Ribalta Experimental Film Festival 2023, Italy                                                  La Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) 2023, Cuba Strangloscope Festival, Brasil 2023                                                                16mm Film Festival, Mumbai, India 2023

`Deep 1′ preview

Opening audio passage from a recording of the “Gayatri Mantra” by mentor/friend Rup Chand (Ann Arbor 1979). He told me that his mother suggested he recite the words when he was in fear.

Om Bhur bhuvah svah                                                                                                          Tat savitur varenyam                                                                                                       Bhargo Devasya dheemahi                                                                                      Dheeyo yonah prachodayaat                                                                                  The Rigveda (10:16:3)

“Oh manifest and unmanifest, wave and ray of breath, red lotus of insight, transfix us from eye to navel to throat, under canopy of stars spring from soil in an unbroken arc of light that we might immerse ourselves until lit from within like the sun itself.”                         (translation from Sanskrit by Ravi Shankar)

About looking at things; envisioning a space “where we are not separated from other things.”  – R.H. Blyth

Deep 1 Frame enlargement from 16mm

“across the window,                                                                                                         birds and beasts look unaware                                                                                   of their decay” –Ph

Still Time in Philip Hoffman’s `Deep 1’ 

 by Lucia Ruggieri, Francesco D’Accia, Matteo Ricci                                          (Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Italy)

The Gāyatrī mantra of the Ṛgveda sets-up the entire short film: it is the mantra itself that creates the atmosphere of darkness, followed by the first creation: the tree, which contains the identity of darkness as if it were its visible matter. Continue reading Deep 1 (2023)