2023 | 90 Min | 16mm - DCP 

Press Kit

Synopsis   

Terra Long’s feature debut is a breathtaking portrait of California’s Coachella Valley that is both anchored in the specifics of place and community, while freely exploring the limits of cinematic time and space. Shaped by seismic forces of the San Andreas Fault, the Coachella Valley is home to an agricultural community built around the date palm trees introduced to the region in the early 1900s. Today, the land and its people face combined threats from economic upheaval, US immigration policy and climate change. With an elliptical grace, Long’s film spans vast expanses of geological time and sweeping desert landscapes into extreme close-ups of the region’s plant and insect life, where microscopic views of cellular biology trace intimate stories of human connection. Beautifully shot on 16mm film and featuring hand-processing techniques that incorporate plants native to the Coachella Valley into the film, Long’s documentary is grounded in place even on a material level.
                                        — J.C.

Credits 

Directed + Camera | Terra Long
Produced + Written | Mireya Martinez,
Sharlene Bamboat + Terra Long
Written with | Daniela Uribe
Edit | Kaija Siirala + Terra Long
Sound Design + Mix | Richy Carey
Additional Camera | Alisha Tejpal

Selected Press:

Encounters with the Coachella Valley Landscape, Filmmaker
A Great Divide, Reverse Shot
Ode to the Natural World, VOX
The Road to Mecca, Cinema Scope
Palm Trees, Persian Myths, and Pageantry POV Magazine

Selected Screenings:

True / False Film Festival, Columbia, US
First Look MoMI, NYC, US
Hot Docs, Toronto, Canada
DOXA, Vancouver, Canada 
DokuFest, Prizren, Kosovo 
Black Canvas Film Festival, CDMX, Mexico
Dok Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Unorthodocs Wexner Center, Columbus, US 
IDFA, Amsterdam, Netherlands
RIDM, Montreal, Canada
Sharjah Film Platform, UAE
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland
Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turkey

2016 | 5 Min | 16mm

“350 million years ago the Tafilalt region was the Rheic Ocean.” So we are informed at the end of Terra Long’s lovely formalist landscape study, which employs the sharp contrast of colored silk against sand and sky to emulate a kind of visual oasis. The material, undulating in the wind, is not a metaphor for the once-present waves. Rather, it demonstrates a time-frame separate from that of the desert itself, which is always in motion but whose geological existence is at a significant remove from human time.

Adding an additional dimension to these images of differential flux, Long displays the work of the apparatus itself: slippage in frame registration, sprockets vibrating, and the specific meeting of the Moroccan sun and the surface of the lens. Each reflects a topography, and in turn a temporality all its own.

— Michael Sicinski, Mubi Notebook

Made during the Weight of Mountains film residency at Café Tissardmine in Morocco

Selected Screenings

• Toronto International Film Festival, Wavelengths, Canada
• International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Jihlava Film Festival, Czech Republic
• Media City Film Festival, Windsor, Detroit, Canada, US
• LA Film Forum: Mysteries Inside Facts curated by David Dinnell US
• Lightfield, Sanfrancisco, US
• Festival Strangloscope, Florianópolis, Brazil
• Exposure Kopernik Observatory, curated by Tomonari Nishikawa NY, US