TALK OF THE TOWN
Synopsis
“Talk of the Town” is a microfilm collaboration set during the 2020 pandemic, with poetry by Edith Goldenhar and images and voice by Quin de la Mer.
Credits
Quin de la Mer – Director
Edith Goldenhar – Writer
Director Statement
EDITH GOLDENHAR:
Starting in mid-March and through the early months of the pandemic, sheltering in place, time melted. We’d ask each other, “What day is this?” One marker was The New Yorker in my mailbox each Wednesday, part of my domestic life since early childhood. I gravitated to the titles of each section, perennial headers that radiated with new meaning.
QUIN DE LA MER:
After reading Didi’s poem and committing it to memory, I took a long walk. It was dusk, and California’s Colorado Desert was still 109 degrees Fahrenheit. A gentle breeze put large palm fronds in motion, and it seemed they were speaking with the poem in my head.
Filming the visual communication and setting the poem to spoken word, the piece united two seemingly separate parts, expressing a global, even universal connection.
Director Biography
QUIN DE LA MER is a conceptual artist based primarily in California. Grounded in place-related processes, Quin wanders this world making work about the unraveling of life on planet earth caused by the global apartheid between those that have and those that do not. She is particularly focused on the gap between the human species and the non-human earth community. Quin earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is currently a Doctoral student in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS, where she combines philosophical inquiry with artistic practice.
EDITH GOLDENHAR is a writer based in Jackson Heights, NY, whose work centers on human rights, gender equity, and social change networks. Her recent documentary, Return to Calais, focused on refugees past and present, starting with her mother’s perilous WW2 exodus. The film premiered in London during the UK’s Refugee Week in 2019 and in 2020 toured US film festivals as the recipient of Le Train Bleu Award (Cinema on the Bayou), Global Spirit Award (Black Maria/Thomas Edison Film Festival), and nominee for Best Short Documentary (Queens World Film Festival). In 2021 Return to Calais will screen at the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris.
