2023 | 90 Min | 16mm - DCP 

Press Kit

Synopsis   

Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from the Middle East flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensory, polyvocal evocation of place.

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 Screenings:

True / False Film Festival - March 2023
First Look MoMI - March 2023

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

2018 | 6 min | 16mm | 2K | 5.1 Sound

An immediate love forms between new friends considering motherhood under the roof of a fierce matriarch. Bodies become porous, and passage, bees pollinate the food we consume, becoming and belonging one to the other. Film developed in lavender, eucalyptus, and hibiscus grown on site.


Filmed during the Site and Cycle residency at Casa Rural in Jalisco, Mexico.

Select Festivals:

• Ann Arbor Film Festival
  
• EXiS Experimental Film & Video Festival, Seoul, Korea.
  
• Edinburgh International Film Festival, Scotland, UK
  
• THOUSANDSUNS CINEMA Media City Film Festival, Online