Green Desert

I made Green Desert after reading Ursula Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction which inspired me to look for a Carrier Bag Style of Filmmaking. Le Guin asks: Was the first instrument of humans really a weapon of domination or rather, a Carrier Bag? The greatest invention, then, were not the long, hard, killing tools but the container; to collect food, stories, things, ideas. This inspires not only the story we tell ourselves about 'human nature' but, for Le Guin, her science fiction writing. Instead of the male centered, linear, simplified hero-story (Story of weapon), Le Guin tells feminist stories of Carrier Bags, that are not reduced to the hero solving a conflict, but rather collect the many worlds of this world, the stories, identities, the mundane and the boring, and put them all into relation to each other. These stories are much closer to real life, because life, human life, is not a hero story, it is not the story of the weapon.

Green Desert is a Carrier Bag, too. We see a woman, or maybe me, walking through the world, creating a story, that does not the binary conflicts narrative. There are no dualisms, no parties that are good or bad, there is ambiguity, and openness. I am particularly interested in the magic of everyday life – the mundane, the seemingly normal, the routines, and the small things. They reflect the myths we tell ourselves about the world, life, masculinities, ‘nature’. Like a Carrier Bag, Green Desert does not foreground one or the other; in the circular shape of a bag, all things in it, even the most mundane, have a chance to be foregrounded.

Green Desert is a feminist re-telling of walking through the world, of being alive. The main character is not here to solve a quest, to fight an enemy, to reveal a secret, to extract nature's truths. Instead of linearity, a clear beginning and a definitive end, Green Desert is about the ongoingness of stories and the plurality of stories. In the last scene, after the film 'ends', the character is seen walking and walking, further away from the camera.

Green Desert, ultimately, is on the one hand a filmic experimentation against dominant forms of filmmaking shaped by conquest, domination, linearity, dualisms, binarity.
But it also is a counter-idea to the dominant assumptions about 'humanity', human nature, linear time and the purpose of life.