Draft:In the Garden of Forking Paths

In the Garden of Forking Paths is a 2021 experimental film directed by Simone Rapisarda Casanova and Dara Culhane.

Plot summary
Just before conditions on Planet Earth became unsuitable for human life, a small group of children received a message from a faraway galaxy: an ancient civilisation plea for notes describing life on Planet Earth. The film is composed of the imaginary remains of those notes.

Production
In the Garden of Forking Paths is an experimental ethnography created and directed by Simone Rapisarda Casanova and Dara Culhane. The film is the result of a 3-year research project involving the communities of ‘Yalis (Alert Bay) and Wei Wai Kum (Campbell River) in Kwakwaka'wakw Nation, Xwesam (Roberts Creek) in Shíshálh and Skwxwú7mesh territories, Klah ah men (Lund) in Tla'amin territory, all in British Columbia. The project invited children from multiethnic families to translate their relationships to place, time, and ways of being through imagination, play, and film. As in Rapisarda's previous works, the stylistic hallmarks include elliptical, metacinematic approach to storytelling, experimentation with filming technology, unconventional collaboration with non-actors and diegetic soundscapes. Rapisarda and Culhane's approach to filmmaking is mostly process-driven, after careful research of the thematic base. Like Rapisarda's previous work, Hegel's Angel, the film is the result of the authors's tight collaboration with a small crew including the children involved, their families and relatives, and the authors' relatives and friends. Rapisarda and Culhane’s commitment to collaboration, or “shared ethnography”, as inspired by filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, infuses their work and results in all participants being credited as co-writers of the film. The intent behind the authors' stylistic and methodological choices is to create a cinematic occasion where people and places may reveal their deepest nature.

Theoretical aspects
In this as in previous films by Rapisarda, the authors question the ethics of ethnographic filmmaking, and especially of Western ethnographic filmmaking. They strive to make the spectator aware of cinematic artificiality by means of the adoption of a filming technology that exposes the directorial chioces. This also provides them with a tool to explore the boundaries of the cinematic medium.

Screenings and awards

 * Freiburger Filmforum - Festival of Transcultural Cinema, screening, 14 May 2023, Freiburg, Germany
 * Muestra de Antropología Audiovisual de Madrid, screening, 15 November 2021, Madrid, Spain
 * Mannheim Arts and Film Festival, screening, 8 September 2022, Mannheim, Germany
 * VIZANTROP Engaged Ethnographic Film Festival, screening, 9 September 2022, Belgrade, Serbia
 * Filmfest Bremen, screening, 23 April 2022, Bremen, Germany
 * International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra, screening, 6 August 2022, Ierapetra, Greece