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Legacy (Italian subtitled version)

This is the Italian subtitled version of “Legacy.”

"Legacy," in collaboration with poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and based on her poem, creates a memory space using symbolic objects, evocative tableaux, and a variety of digital effects to concretize the wisdom that comes with temporal and emotional distance, creating a fanciful, wry, and occasionally bittersweet postmortem of a relationship that founders on the rocks of cross cultural differences.

Text of the poem:

Legacy

Each summer, your mother’s hands
transformed heaped bowls of ripe fruit
into glistening fillings.
Her deft persuasion of dough into pastry
through the white silted air
Rhubarb, blueberry, peach, apple --
desserts for a year’s worth of holidays.

I tried to make pie
the way I tried to be a wife:
four pyrex pie plates, a battle
to bind flour, fat and water
into elusive tenderness.

You gave me a yearning
for homemade pie
that lingered longer than love,
then left with the pie plates

and what you learnt --
congee breakfasts,
the intricate textures of dim sum,
how to eat shark's fin
with a spoonful of vinegar,
never to forgo the good luck
of red bean soup, and always
to rest your chopsticks
parallel across the bowl
at a meal's end.

From Fiona Tinwei Lam, Intimate Distances (Nightwood Editions, Canada, 2002) Copyright © Fiona Tinwei Lam 2002

Biography of Fiona Tinwei Lam

Fiona Tinwei Lam is a writer, editor, and educator from Vancouver, Canada. She has authored three poetry collections: Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and Odes & Laments. as well as a children’s book. Her poetry and prose appear in over 40 anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry (2010 and 2020 editions). She has co-edited two anthologies of nonfiction and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poetry about Facing Cancer. Her award-winning video poems have been screened at festivals locally and internationally, and she has recently been named the Poet Laureate of Vancouver. Learn more at her website: www.fionalam.net

  • Pamela Falkenberg
    Director
  • Jack Cochran
    Director
  • Fiona Tinwei Lam
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Other
  • Genres:
    poetry film
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 3 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    March 28, 2021
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    4K digital video
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Cadence Video Poetry Festival (English version screened)
    Seattle, WA
    United States
    April 16, 2021
    World premiere
    Official selection
  • Film and Folklore Festival (English subtitled version screened)
    Chaguanas, Caronit
    Trinidad and Tobago
    May 27, 2021
    Caribbean premiere
    Official selection
  • MicroActs Artist Film Screening (English version screened)
    London
    United Kingdom
    June 24, 2021
    United Kingdom premiere
    Official selection
  • ABI Film Festival (English subtitled version screened)
    Bucharest
    Hungary
    July 9, 2021
    Hungarian premiere
    Official selection
  • Alternating Currents (English version screened)
    Davenport, IA
    United States
    August 19, 2021
    Iowa premiere
    Official selection
  • KinoDrome: International Motion Picture & Screenplay Festival (English version screened)
    Cleveland, OH
    United States
    September 26, 2021
    Ohio premiere
    Official selection; Award winner, Best Experimental Short
  • CREATE: Flash Film Fest (English version screened)
    Catskill, NY
    United States
    September 30, 2021
    New York premiere
    Official selection
  • Munich Music Video Awards (English subtitled version screened)
    Munich
    Germany
    September 30, 2021
    German premiere
    Official selection, finalist
  • Midwest Video Poetry Festival (English subtitled version screened)
    Milwaukee, WI
    United States
    October 8, 2021
    Midwest premiere
    Official selection
  • FECIBogota International Independent Film Fair of Bogota (Spanish subtitled version screened)
    Bogota
    Colombia
    October 16, 2021
    Columbia premiere
    Official Selection
  • Sanctuary International Film Festival (English version screened)
    Sanctuary Cove, Queensland
    Australia
    November 12, 2021
    Australian premiere
    Official selection
  • O Bheal Poetry Film Competition (English version screened)
    Cork
    Ireland
    November 28, 2021
    Irish premiere
    Official selection, short list of 30 films
  • Vera Cruz World Film Festival (Spanish subtitled version screened)
    Vera Cruz
    Mexico
    December 1, 2021
    Mexico premiere
    Official selection
  • Festival international de Cine con Medios Alternativos (Spanish subtitled version screened)
    Mexico City
    Mexico
    December 7, 2021
    Mexico City premiere
    Official selection
  • Versi Di Luce (Italian subtitled version screened)
    Monica, Sicily
    Italy
    December 16, 2021
    Italian premiere
    Official selection
  • Festival Angaelica (English version screened)
    Pasadena, CA
    United States
    December 21, 2021
    Southern California premiere
    Official selection
  • 5th International Folklore Festival 2022
    Thrissur, Kerala
    India
    January 1, 2022
    India premiere
    Official selection; Finalist, Best Short Film
  • Balkan Can Kino (English subtitled version screened)
    Athens
    Greece
    February 1, 2022
    Greece premiere
    Official selection
  • REELpoetry (English version screened)
    Houston, TX
    United States
    February 25, 2022
    Texas premiere
    Official selection
Director Biography - Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran

Pam is an independent filmmaker who received her PhD from the University of Iowa and taught at Northern Illinois University, St.Mary's College, and the University of Notre Dame. She directed the largest student film society in the US while she was at the University of Iowa, and also ran films series for the Snite Museum of Art in South Bend, IN. Her experimental film with Dan Curry, Open Territory, received an individual filmmaker grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Center for New Television and the Indiana Arts Council. OT screened at the Pacific Film Archives, as well at numerous film festivals, including the AFI Video Festival, and was nominated for a regional Emmy. Her other films include museum installations, scholarly/academic hybrid works shown at film conferences, and a documentary commissioned by the Peace Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She is an occasional contributor to Moving Poems Magazine (http://discussion.movingpoems.com/).

Jack is an independent filmmaker who has produced, directed, or shot a variety of experimental and personal projects. As a DP he has extensive experience shooting commercials, independent features, and documentaries. His varied commercial client list includes BMW, Ford, Nissan, Fujifilm, Iomega, Corum Watches, and Forte Hotels. His features and documentaries have shown at the Sundance, Raindance, Telluride, Tribeca, Edinburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Taos film Festivals, winning several honors. His commercials and documentaries have won Silver Lions from Cannes, a BAFTA (British Academy Award), Peabody Awards, and Cable Aces. Some notable credits: Director of Photography on Brian Griffin's Claustrofoamia, Cinematography for Antony Thomas’ Tank Man, Director/Cinematographer of Viento Nocturno, and Cinematographer of Ramin Niami’s feature film Paris. Jack was trained at the University of Iowa Creative Writers Workshop as well as the University of Iowa film studies program.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

For over five years, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg have been making personal films together again under the name Outlier Moving Pictures. They hope their work will prove worthy of the name: avoiding the usual patterns and approaching their subject matter from the margins (which sounds better than saying that as filmmakers they're oddballs and cranks). Pam and Jack met in graduate school and made films together when they were young. Jack went on to become a professional cinematographer working out of LA and London, while Pam stayed in the Midwest, where she was a college professor and independent filmmaker before dropping out to work in visual display.

Their first film together, "The Cost of Living," based on some of Jack's short poems, screened at several film festivals, including the Buffalo International Film Festival and the Cornwall Film Festival, was nominated for two awards at the 2019 Queens World Festival, and took the award for best experimental film at the 2016 WV FILMmakers Festival. Other short poetry films have screened at the Ò Bhéal Poetry Film Festival (2016, 2018, 2019), the Juteback Poetry Film Festival (2017, 2018), the Festival Silencio (2017), the Filmpoem Festival (2017), the 6th CYCLOP Videopoetry Festival (2017), the 6th, 7th, and 8th International Video Poetry Festival (Athens Greece), REELpoetry (2019, 2020), and the Hombres Videopoetry Award screening of shortlisted films, 2020. Their most ambitious film, "Teddy Roosevelt and Fracking," about environmental threats to the wild landscapes of North Dakota, premiered at the 2018 Queens World Film Festival, where it was nominated for three awards and took the award for Best Documentary Short, followed by awards at the Go West Film Festival, the Ozark Foothills Film Festival, and the American Presidents Film and Literary Festival at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museum. Their most recent poetry films, "In West Virginia," and "Flag Country," based on poems by Dave Bonta, have already screened at the Buffalo International Film Festival, the Small Axe Radical Film Festival, the Newlyn Film Festival, the North Dakota Human Rights Arts Festival, and the Show Me Justice Film Festival. Pam and Jack have just completed a new triptych with Lucy English on climate change, "I Want to Breathe Sweet Air" and another about the dystopian city, "Scary Places/Shapes & Sizes," from Jack's erasure poem. "Legacy," in collaboration with Fiona Tinwei Lam, and based on her poem, is their most recent film.

Jack and Pam co-direct the films they make together, and they collaborate fully, even when they divide up the credits. Their poetry films usually start with a poem (often, but not always, one of Jack’s poems), which they think of as analogous to a script. However, when collaborating with Lucy English on “The Shadow” and “The Names of Trees,” the process was more dialectical: some images and sounds came first, then Lucy wrote the poems; the poems inspired more images, and eventually the edited film poems. For us, the exact process depends on the project and remains open to experiment, so our body of work is somewhat disparate and hard to categorize. Some of our eclectic interests include collage, found footage, and repurposing; the film essay and film poetry; image capturing and post-production techniques that reveal what cannot be seen with the eyes alone (e.g., high shutter speeds, moving cameras, infrared photography, green screen and digital layering); landscapes and the ways humans mark them; human rights/social justice; and postmodern melodrama.

Jack has written poetry all his life, but he never knew what to do with it until he shared his notebooks with Pam, who said, “You’re a filmmaker -- shouldn’t your poems be films?” Pam and Jack both want to make lots of different kinds of films together, but Pam is especially proud to have been the one who suggested that Jack’s poems should come to life as films. They are both delighted that making films of Jack's poems has led to interesting collaborations with other poets and filmmakers.