Geographies of Solitude with Jacquelyn Mills

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[May 9, 2022] How can we experience a place as sacred through cinema? This week, we are in dialogue with Jacquelyn Mills about her enchanting film, GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE which premiered in the Berlinale and was part of the ninth edition of Art of the Real at FIlm at Lincoln Center in New York.

Through this work, Mills offers us an immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island and the life of Zoe Lucas, an environmentalist who has lived over 40 years on a remote sliver of land off the coast of Canada, where she spends her life collecting, cleaning, and documenting marine litter that washes up on the islands' shore.

Shot on 16mm, the film often incorporates eco-friendly filmmaking techniques to capture, in beautiful effect, Mills' encounters with Zoe Lucas and the Island. In this sense, Zoe Lucas and Sable Island are not "subjects" of the film but collaborators and co-creators.

We spoke with Jacquelyn Mills to learn more about her intuitive approach to making this film and the different ways she worked with her surroundings - including eco-friendly hand-processing techniques like using plant emulsion, exposing parts of the film in moonlight and starlight, and placing specimens from Sable Island on film stock.

Towards the end of the episode, we speak briefly about her previous film, IN THE WAVES (2017), a touching portrait of her grandmother as she grieves the loss of a sister, available to stream on Vimeo.

This episode was co-produced by Christina Zachariades in Brooklyn, Sean Van Wert in Toronto and with original music by Nayeem Mahbub in Stockholm.