The Cartographer is a 38 minute short feature film.
Winner Best Short Feature Film and Audience Award at The 2022 Berlin Short Film Festival.
THE FILM
Available to view with permission soon.
PROJECT/PROCESS
Message
We’d like to go outside a little more. We’d like to be on the computer a little less, or the phone and all the other devices too. We're a little concerned about how much time we're spending indoors. We feel heavier when we’ve sat in front of the screen all day. Our eyes are dull. Our backs hurt. We feel disconnected from other people, from the world and from nature. On those days we find that we want something that’s not here. We’re not breathing, we're not living, we're not in the world. We're not experiencing what we’ve already got. We’d like to nudge people a little bit, to notice this.
Project
The Cartographer film is a meditation on nature and technology, and what happens when they collide. It’s about getting lost and finding your way again. There will be cows and goats, stars and bug-bites and strange tramping prophets. There will be the sounds of microprocessors, human heartbeats, and wild things in the underbrush. It’ll be strange and funny, poetic and profound. The Cartographer explores the threshold between the modern world (its ever-engrossing technical advancements), the natural world and the human world. How can these things exist better together? How can we stop for a moment? How can we resist?
Process
We had a simple idea a few years ago. The idea was originally meant for the theatre. Since then the project has morphed into a 24-page screenplay. It’s a story about a normal person who takes a walk. They’re paid to take this walk, wearing a heavy and awkward helmet-cam to photograph and map a natural area, so that it can be experienced online. Along the way questions arise. Why not simply take the walk for its own sake? Who needs to see a walking path online, anyway? Would we all be better off experiencing nature unmediated? The Cartographer is all of us-- burdened by technology, liberated by spontaneous experiences of nature. We’re creating and shooting The Cartographer in South West England and Wales in the Spring of 2021. We’re working with a small crew and small budget. We’re going to get creative and we’re going to keep it simple. Our goal with this project is to encourage people to stop and think, and to take a break to see what they already have. To go outside. To take a walk. To breathe. To live. To connect.
Get in touch with us. Tell us what you think of the film.
E-mail us at thecartographerproject@gmail.com
