Experiencing Interruptions?

Jornada

A day-long, 25-mile journey on foot in the New Mexico desert ends at a portal to other worlds. Beneath a steady rhythm of footsteps and song of wind, the passing land whispers fragmented tales of the movement of humans, their machines and livestock -- past, present and future.

  • Maria Trunk
    Director
  • Maria Trunk
    Writer
  • Chuck Kooshian
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Nature, Travel, Observational, Performative
  • Runtime:
    26 minutes 1 second
  • Completion Date:
    December 12, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    1,200 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:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Maria Trunk

I grew up in Orlando, Florida, in the 1970’s and 80’s, the child of a Mexican mother and American (Midwestern!) father, always negotiating a nervous balance between languages, stories, unspoken assumptions and expectations. It wasn’t until my first visit to the desert Southwest that I began to feel this unsettledness as less a confusing burden and more a source of creative energy. Here the illusions and contradictions of the ‘American Dream’ are laid bare, their edges not softened by gentle light or kindly vegetation. Bareness seems to excite my imagination.

I’ve moved away from the Borderlands several times and always came back, most recently in 2017, hopefully for good at last. My practice explores intersections between Nature and Culture, Science and Art. I believe hope for a humane future lies in the revelations that emerge only from true collaboration between these different ways of knowing and constructing the World.

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Director Statement

When I first learned that a spaceport was being built in the Jornada del Muerto area of southern New Mexico, the ironies of the chosen site impressed me more than anything else: its inauspicious name (“Dead Man’s Journey”), associations with danger and hardship, and a long history of the lowest of low-tech travel on foot or by oxcart. My collaborator, Chuck Kooshian, and I were interested in exploring the contrasts, as we knew the Jornada to be a remote swath of open rangeland accessible only by a few poorly marked dirt roads. But by the time we got around to acting on our idea, however, the state had paved twenty-odd miles connecting Spaceport America to Interstate 25 and lined them all with barbed-wire fence!

We decided to go ahead and document a day’s journey walking this spanking new route, pacing out a slow meditation on human movement and the environment. We felt that a narrative voice might intrude on the rhythm, and our instinct was fortuitously bolstered during prep visits when we saw that road signs and other human-made and natural features could very well tell their own subtle story. On the actual shooting day, as I trekked through familiar desert terrain I was surprised to experience sudden shifts in perception where everything around me suddenly became new and strange. I felt like I could be the first human explorer on a distant planet wondering how the dynamic processes of light, land and life all fit together. I hope viewers who immerse themselves in the sequence of moments we present here can get a sense of this strangeness, perhaps find a conduit to possibilities suggested at the end of the film -- the destination?