7 7

I recently heard an artist say, ‘let it wash over you’ as a guide to their work. It’s been said before and seems obvious but I feel it applies here. Don’t need to know or follow ‘what’s going on’ in a conventional sense. Rather, consider using colour, shape, composition, montage, movement, rhythm, or audio as your guide. You might find you had an understanding of the piece regardless of how you might be unsure how to convey the story or the experience to another person.

7 7 is a place where a personal, abstract experience is encouraged... where it's validated, valued, and protected.
The experience is deliberately constructed and fluid but that's not to say the film behaves like others.

The project started over a decade ago with a three-day exploratory shoot from an outline I’d written based on long pieces of experimental music a friend gave me one day. When I considered the compositions, each unintentionally feature-film length, I imagined them as dreamlike 'screenplays' or epic languageless poems and wondered what it might mean to create a film-work with something like that as a starting place.

Meanwhile, I had been working with concepts like:

The intersections between self-discovery, identity and voyeurism.
How do we look for ourselves and each other in what we watch? How do we watch?

The timing of our deaths.
If two strangers suddenly die together (in the case of the film, a car crash) they’ve shared perhaps the most significant moment of their existence so, could that instance represent the beginning of one of the most important relationships of their lives? What might happen then? Would it be a love story? Would they use each other to come to peace or resolve past, present, and future issues?

The resulting creation is an avant-garde/experimental narrative comprised of numerous shooting and editing phases starting in 2011.

I don't wish to suggest that work has been done on 7 7 throughout all that time but rather that the concepts and participants matured and for a film meaning to create an authentically contemplative experience this ended up being the right process. Actors inhabited situations and characters with loose direction to enhance exploration and lead to profound, personal discoveries. Ultimately, the soundtrack was created while editing was happening, so direction, performance, photography, editing, sound, and music truly collaborated to arrive to create an organic, artistic conclusion. In a sense, we dreamt together.

Conventions in language in all art forms (written, spoken, visual, audio,etc) reinforce dominant culture and the power structures that control it. 7 7 renegotiates the structures and tools that create 'meaning' in film.

7 7 sets out to challenge status-quo narrative film conventions through structure, visual texture, and by featuring no (understandable) dialogue. I enforced this as an artistic constraint throughout the process because I wanted to abandon my comfort zones entirely and work in a fluid, emotional and intellectual space. At some points throughout the process, I wrote scenes but abandoned them quickly. I don't experience dreams with dialogue often so this didn’t feel authentic. I might recall that I was talking about something, but the specific words don't stay, only the essence of the exchange. Structurally, the experience starts in a relatively linear place and we can comfortably create a narrative from the information provided but soon, order and 'sense' are shattered into splinters of glass, like the windshield smashing in a car crash, and we must contemplate the situation in more fractured and personal ways. The elasticity of time and space, the questions of what happened before and after the crash, start to melt away into a new shared reality.

I wanted to have a narrative experience like 7 7 - one where everything could be ephemeral and open, and simultaneously one that is also deliberately constructed. A dream state with ordered fragments. Through the use of repetition, abstract connections between images, frame compositions, movement, character, event, and a hypnotic score/soundscape, I’m inviting the viewer to create their own narrative experience with few recognizable guidelines. They can decode their own feelings and thoughts as they lean into the dream and I feel like this allows space for emotional and intellectual contemplation.

This approach aims to unlock personal and expansive possibilities of narrative, theme, and statement to be discovered in 7 7. It asks both the characters in the film and audiences to explore their relationships with narrative form itself, projected images, the voyeurism inherent in the cinema as an experience, matters of gender roles, relationships, and the fragility of consciousness and ultimately existence itself.

The film can be read as an afterlife story where our main characters use their transition to a different time/space as an opportunity to revisit past real and imagined traumas to arrive at a state of peace; or, as a number of concurrent events that, like consciousness itself, bounce between dimensions, time, and states of awareness and action.


I am currently working on a companion essay for the film. For now I will provide the follow to those who might find it useful:

FILM SYNOPSIS (An optional framework from which viewers may construct or extract narrative)

7 7 starts when we meet two individuals living a routine, patterned first-world existence. We don’t witness them interacting with others but rather, in their more private, intimate moments… as if we’re spying on them. They are strangers to each other.

Then, they drive their cars into a crash with each other. By the violence of the event, one that smashes them through their respective windshields, we might think they are dead, but there is no evidence, and rather, there IS evidence that they have transitioned into an alternative state of consciousness or existence.

From there, 'The Couple' is introduced to a cast of archetypical characters, like ‘The Gatekeeper’, The Mother‘, ‘The Rival’, and others, and of course, each other thus starting the most significant relationships in their existences. If ‘death’ represents the most dramatic transition of consciousness, might those with whom it is experienced take on existential meaning?

The Couple then begins the non-linear journey through themselves and each other. They engage in an intimate relationship that unlocks other plains of their existences. Past, present, and future melt into one stream, and they dream together. They dream of their traumas, their influences, the roles they have played, those given to them by society, and their ‘lives’, experienced in both the ‘real world’ and in their imaginations blend.

They seek their identities, understanding, resolution, and transcendence through voyeuristic activities. Ultimately they focus on 'The Conduit'. This figure dresses up and takes selfies through which The Couple finds ways to explore their psychological and emotional layers in search of peace and resolve…. Until they’re caught and The Conduit turns their lens on them!

Upset and made vulnerable by this development, The Couple conspires to attack The Conduit and render them silent as a defense mechanism. But after unrest and argument, they awaken to their wrongdoing and release The Conduit.

In turn, The Conduit frees them and they drift away.