running up that hill
There are some kinds of grief that tear your life into two pieces: before, and after.
In the winter of 2020, in an act of racialized and classist violence, I was displaced from my home and thrust into a life-altering period of homelessness.
The following year, even after successfully re-housing myself, the trauma of the displacement rendered me hollow and emotionally feral. Months passed. I dreamt of a mime haunting my old apartment, and decided that the dream was meant to materialize into a short film of a drag performance.
I enlisted six dear friends and collaborators and we spent two frenzied weeks designing and fabricating the dream into reality.
On the evening of the end of my original lease, we returned to the old apartment. We mapped, installed, and filmed the entire video in one evening between the hours of 8pm and 4am.
The take we ultimately used for the video was our final take. It is a single tracking shot that begins in the witching hour and ends with the dawn breaking.
Note: The video involves strobe lighting briefly at timestamp 2:04 and again from 3:45 to 4:13.
Running Up That Hill is a howl, a capsule of a deeply, definitively embittered moment in my life. As I write this, I consider the rage and grief of an oyster as it wretches a pearl.
Fully shot on iPhone
One tracking shot, with no cuts
Lighting and effects practicals included one candelabra with five candles, two flashlights, two LED color-changing remote-controlled bulbs, two miniature projectors, one haze machine, and one strobe light
production notes
Above: Screen testing the transition from the flamingo room until the lighting strike.
For this transition, the crew held these positions off-screen: KC with handheld color-changing lightbulbs, Olivia with candelabra handoff, Vanessa with strobing flashlight, Jonathan with board to extinguish candelabra, Daniel and V behind the camera.
influences
Suspiria (1977)
dir: Dario Argento
Sprawl II by Arcade Fire (2011)
dir: Vincent Morisset
