A Shape Of Things To Come
Fri, Mar 19
|Virtual Cinema
Whether harvesting medicinal herbs, smoking a Sonoran toad’s psychedelic venom, or cultivating unsettling acts of eco-terrorism, Sundog’s way of life raises provocative questions about humanity’s relation to the environment – and to itself – amidst the specter of global collapse.
Time & Location
Mar 19, 2021, 12:00 AM EDT – Apr 09, 2021, 12:00 AM EDT
Virtual Cinema
About the event
A SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (2020) 77 mins. Dir. by Lisa Marie Malloy & J.P. Sniadecki. Virtual Tickets are $12.
This modern borderlands Western follows Sundog, an herbalist-hunter-homesteader who lives off the land in the Sonoran Desert. As Border Patrol encroaches on his relative freedom, he becomes increasingly unnerved and ventures beyond the bounds of his survivalism. WATCH: https://projectr.tv/movie/a-shape-of-things-to-come/?theater=17
A collaboration between anthropologist-filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, whose work includes FOREIGN PARTS (2010), THE IRON MINISTRY (2014), and EL MAR LA MAR (2017), and Lisa Marie Malloy, an artist committed to devotional and engaged modes of filmmaking, A SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME is a rapturously observational cinematic portrait that inhabits the liminal space between documentary, narrative, and experimental modes. It is as free and shape-shifting, as provocative and unknowable, as its singular protagonist.
“Gives precedence to the sensory materiality of the desert instead of to explanations and dialogue, and moves beyond the human scale and down to animal perspectives. It creates a world that stretches from a distant past in the ecological movements of the 1960s to a possible future in the aftermath of the apocalypse. Malloy and Sniadecki’s film is equal parts Walden and Western, but the magnificent isolation stands in paradoxical contrast to the great, smoldering problems of our times. With the desert as the ultimate existential (and cinematic) setting, the film shows the relationship between humanity and nature at a critical time, when civil disobedience is the provocative answer to the most pressing questions.”
–CPH:DOX
"A romantic fantasy of pandemic isolation, but the film also suggests a post-collapse reality of off-grid existence.”
– Steve Dollar, Filmmaker Magazine
“A loner in America’s Southwestern desert is the elusive subject of this mysterious documentary. Directors Lisa Marie Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki’s minimalist portrait evokes several themes — everything from the restorative power of nature to civilisation’s destructive tendencies.” – Tim Grierson, Screen Daily
“Fascinating. Sublime. Has aesthetic qualities that rival anything contemporary documentary has to offer. Images are remarkably composed.” – Matt Turner, The Brooklyn Rail