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Falls the Shadow

A poetic meditation on Stanza V of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Hollow Men (1925). A human being moves through space and time, contemplating mortality and the meaning of existence.

  • Martina Reese
    Director
  • T.S. Eliot
    Writer
  • Sarah Martin
    Key Cast
    "Human Being"
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 41 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 16, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Martina Reese

Martina Reese is a Chicago-based independent filmmaker who, since 2010, has been creating subtle, haunting, and provocative short films on tiny budgets. She is currently at work on Zombie and will begin production on Exile (@Exilemovie2020) in July following a year-long, pandemic delay. Whichever one gets done first will be her first feature film. Festival awards include: Pity (Malta Film Festival 2019 Official Selection; German United Film Festival 2018 Semi-Finalist); Slow Me Down (French Independent Film Festival 2019 Official Selection); and The Librarians (Rome Film Awards 2019 Official Selection).

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Director Statement

Trained as a graphic designer but only partly fulfilled by my years of employment as a designer, film creation has been a breakthrough for me. It woke me up from a feeling of going through the motions. I love filmmaking because it is hard but not impossible. I love filmmaking because so much is out of my control, yet planning and organization are indispensable. I love it because it involves so much disappointment, yet there seems to always be a way to channel failure into growth. I love it because it is synthetic. I have never been comfortable in a narrow discipline and film brings everything together. Everything.
Filmmaking is both technical and aesthetic, visual and aural, literal and metaphorical, collaborative and solitary, organizational and intuitive. It changes the way I inhabit the world; I find myself paying more attention to places, faces, witnessed phenomena, chance encounters, overheard conversational fragments, light, sound, music, literature. And, of course, creating in the film medium changes the way I watch film. To me, at best, films are groping and imperfect attempts to express something elusive and ambiguous. I am drawn to films that find beauty in the ordinary, the un-beautiful. I relate to stories that don't have a tidy resolution.