Private Project

Bare White Bones

In this wild, haunting cine-poem based on the macabre Scottish ballad "The Twa Corbies," our modern-day ecological crises are evoked through shadow puppetry, landscape photography, and masked performance. Music by Australian composer Wally Gunn. Performance by flute/percussion duo Caballito Negro.

  • Christopher Lucas
    Writer + Director
    Above All Else (2014), The Sensitives (2017), Shouting Down Midnight (2022)
  • Tessa Brinckman
    Musicians + Cast Members
  • Terry Longshore
    Musicians + Cast Members
  • Wally Gunn
    Composer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Music Video, Short, Other
  • Genres:
    Music, Performance, Environmental
  • Runtime:
    11 minutes 35 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2022
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital 4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography

Christopher Lucas has an appointment as Assistant Professor of Digital Cinema at Southern Oregon University. He produces creative documentaries on ecological and environmental topics. In 2014, he produced Above All Else (SXSW 2014) about activists fighting the Keystone XL Pipeline in East Texas. He produced numerous shorts and commercial projects between 2012 and 2016 as a staff producer with Fiege Films in Austin, Texas. He also served as associate producer on Shouting Down Midnight (SXSW, 2022) and The Sensitives (Tribeca, 2017) and a writer and researcher for Living Springs, an interactive environmental documentary about Barton Springs in Austin. He has been a participant in the Spotlight On Documentaries Forum at IFP’s Film Week and Doc Society’s Climate Story Lab.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

When Tessa and Terry brought this piece of music to me, I was drawn in by its unique sound and the wide range of feelings through the many transitions and changes in direction. It felt like many stories in one. The chanting and the Latin felt haunting, mysterious, and old—like ancient forces still flowing around us. From the first I wanted to capture the savage humor of the Scots, from whence this Twa Corbies tale emerges, along with the rowdy humanism of Rabelais and his celebration of the grotesque, the powerless, and the marvelous in that same period. But there is also a deeper, tragic view, a vanitas to link this old fable with our current predicaments and the stalking figure of death, so much on our minds in 2021. I hope you enjoy the film—or, at least, find it hard to forget.