When It Was Blue

(Iceland, USA, 2008, 68 mins)

DigiBeta

Selected Filmography:  

PROD/CAM/ED: Jennifer Reeves
MUS: Skúli Sverrisson

The term "environmental film" can evoke a dutiful evening of Al Gore and PowerPoint. Likewise, the reputation of experimental film is--just as unfairly--"difficult" or, well, "boring." Both of these narrow-minded slurs are exploded by Jennifer Reeves in her captivating tour de force, When It Was Blue. An elaborate, frenetic double-projection montage structured in four parts representing the directions of the compass and the seasons of earth's renewal, this is a serious, eye-popping work of personal expression, a look at the beauty still present in our endangered world, as seen by a very talented artist.

The culmination of years of globetrotting and an equally lengthy post-production, the film was shot in diverse ecosystems across the globe: Iceland, New Zealand, Central America, the US--and even Canada's Pacific coast, including Vancouver Harbour (when Reeves was a VIFF guest in 2004 with The Time We Killed). Reeves then hand-painted the 16mm film, creating impressionistic textures and colours that mimic the qualities of land, water and trees, and fuse with the photographic imagery. (Each new landscape expresses a range of human emotions, associated with the cycle of life and its seasons.) Accompanied by a beautiful score of mostly acoustic wind and string instruments from Icelandic composer Skúli Sverrisson, the film is a wide-ranging play on the notion of "blue"--the colour, the sensation, the sinking realization that the natural world must be captured as much as possible before it disappears. And there's nothing boring or difficult about it.

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