Barbed Wire Land

Poem written by Olivia Louise in 2014 and adapted to a video poem in 2020
Score by asterisk*, Okonomiyaki I-IV (shifteight.bandcamp.com)

Premiered at the Cadence Festival (virtually) hosted by the NW Film Forum in 2021 and won an honorable mention.

"This smart, well-researched piece starts with a seemingly small footnote in the history of Western expansion – the invention of the barbed-wire fence – and finds within it a powerful metaphor for the entire American way of seeing and being in the world. The filmmaker's multilayered story of place, people, technology, and ideology is brought home by fantastic archival footage, strong and well-paced editing, and a clear-eyed sense of what the country they call BARBED WIRE LAND, at its core, is all about."