Off the Trail on the road to Berlin.

Off the Trail, a short film by Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan is the winner of the prestigious ZEBRA Poetry award as the best poetry film.

Nick Jordan and  Jacob Cartwright are well-known names to the friends of Directors Lounge, Their hauntingly beautiful short Edgar was a darling of the very first Berlin International Directors Lounge back in 2005 and had several apperances in curated screenings.

In 2008 we screened New Madrid, a poetic movie shot in the Mississippi floodplain at an area of swampland formed by the earthquakes of 1811-12, an area that was once the town New Madrid.

The 10 min short Off the Trail, adapted from Cartwright and Jordan’s longer work, Headlands Lookout is based on the poem “Endless Streams and Mountains“ by Gary Snyder.

Walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the broad white space….Lead out and tip the moist, black line.
                             
Gary Snyder’s invocation to the muse of a Chinese scroll painter sets the tone as the camera follows a central protagonist, a soldier from another era, as he performs a series of actions and rituals. The uniformed figure paints Chinese nature symbols, chants, meditates and wanders dreamlike through a rolling Californian landscape of fog-shrouded hills, coastal defences and dense woodland valleys. Scenes are  filmed in former US military barracks, and in the long-abandoned homes and circular library of Gary Snyder and Zen philosopher Alan Watts, accompanied by haiku and poetry readings from Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, and the disembodied voice of Alan Watts, ruminating upon the passage of time and our perception of the ‘wild’.

Off the trail will be shown, next to the other ZEBRA Poetry award winners, will be shown at the Poetry film gala on Wednesday, Nov 16 during the Interfilm festival.

8pm: Poetry film gala
10pm: Best of

Hackesche Höfe Kino, Rosenthaler Straße 40-41, 10178 Berlin

Entrance: 8/7 Euro