I Wish You Would

A meditation on life as text, and how we may outlive our finite selves in the realm of the imaginary.

A bad day for Willow only gets worse, like the weather.

We are meant to dilate at the sight Of paper’s lightweight handheld printing

Ryland Walker Knight’s Mann’s Sparks is a hypnotic essay film that stitches together footage from Michael Mann’s iconic filmography with Beach House’s 2015 album Depression Cherry into an editorial masterstroke. As much as the film stands as a testament to Knight’s craft as editor, it also acts as a thematic dialogue between the dream pop band’s music and the images by one of cinema’s greatest auteurs, spanning Mann’s work from Thief (1981) to Blackhat (2015). It’s a mesmeric work, both visually and sonically, acting also as a document of Knight’s own development as an editor after suffering an injury and using Mann’s footage and the band’s album to relearn how to edit. Mann’s Sparks is a spellbinding celebration of cinematic language and how it can be reused, relearned, and reimagined into new possibilities.

An Indigenous man investigates a mysterious sound echoing through the city that reverberates through space and time.