Watch
SQUARE | 3:37 min
“SQUARE” is the story of a room. It is also a comment on memory on the warp-effect that emotion has on perception. The film follows a woman through her morning routine of feeding the fish, making the bed and watering the plant in the window. Yet with each event, the objects in the room are transformed, exaggerated, dismantled and re-imagined in entirely new ways. Based on her poem “Sigur Rós doesn’t sound the same on these speakers,” author and director Michelle Elrick used images from the text as the backbone for “SQUARE”. Throughout, the author’s voice is present in the foreground, anchoring and skewing the cinematic images.
“SQUARE” was filmed at the Black Lodge Studio in Winnipeg by Tyler Funk. The poem was recorded in Montreal by Tonio Morin-Vargas, film sound design and original score are by Matt Peters, with art direction and set design by Seth Woodyard and Peter Kralik respectively. Financial assistance was provided by the Manitoba Arts Council.
expect something and nothing at once | 3:36 min
Written and directed by Michelle Elrick, this film follows the poet from the stillness of a room to the windswept, late-Autumn field where she struggles to recreate the essence of home. A stark and beautiful film from the Canadian prairie, “expect something and nothing at once” is based on a poem from Elrick’s book, then/again (Nightwood Editions, 2017).
This is the first film collaboration between Elrick and cinematographer, Tyler Funk, and was shot in one afternoon in rural Manitoba and in the empty 6th floor studio of Winnipeg warehouse. The soundscape that underlies the film was made from sounds collected in Austria, Scotland, and Reykjavík, Iceland.
This film grew out of a larger project called “Notes from the Fort: a poetic of inhabited space,” a series of performance installations that create intimate places in unfamiliar environments through the play-act of fort building. The poetry that serves as the backbone of this film uses a series of bright, vivid images to carry the listener through a kind of nostos or homecoming.
“expect something and nothing at once” is distributed by the Winnipeg Film Group and has screened at festivals in Canada, the USA and the UK (Best Cinematography, Suffolk International Film Festival, 2013), and had it’s television debut on CBC’s Canadian Reflections program in 2015.
LIVE PERFORMACE
“St. Moritz” at St. Moritz in Abbotsford, BC on April 2, 2017. This poem is a whimsical description of a house in the style of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Performed here in the house that inspired the poem to a warm audience of friends and family, nieces and a nephew (who makes an appearance in the background!).