In the Manner of Smoke

A silent fisherman in Texas, a blazing oil field in North Dakota, a mysterious community in Virginia, a women’s prison in Oregon, and a modernist home in California are the ostensible subjects of Austin Lynch and Matthew Booth’s new feature, GRAY HOUSE. But as meditations upon nature, isolation, decadence, and destitution, they are flawless conduits for seamless blends of documentary and narrative form, and stunning explorations of sound, image, and cinematic time. Mysterious and elusive, yet possessing an aesthetic and sensory unity (appearances by Denis Lavant, Aurore Clément, and Dianna Molzan mix with direct addresses from real-life laborers and inmates), GRAY HOUSE quietly recalibrates one’s sense of the world and our place within it.

A film in which the story is pieced together from letters about the exchange of seeds.

In 2014, Curt Heiner, Robert Schaller, and Armand Yervant Tufenkian made a film in Colorado's Mt. Zirkel Wilderness. It briefly chronicles both a climb and the struggle to document it using a handmade photographic emulsion that was prepared and coated onto celluloid outside on a rock at night using water from a rushing creek, rolled up before dawn during a lightning storm, shot under the constant threat of more lightning, and processed carefully on-location the next night. What results is presented as it came out of the camera, the result of a collaboration between the filmmakers and the wilderness environment where they lived for a week.