An enigmatic choreography of industriousness and dysfunction, Terrestrial carries us through the arterial flows of transport, into buried subway networks and soaring aerial views, against a backdrop of uniquely human dissonance. - Andrea Picard
“As Walter demonstrates most forcefully in Terrestrial, our humanity's desire to map, order, subordinate, and conquer our lived environments, to render them static and predictable, has produced a vast, invisible spectrum of potential collisions. Technology's dulling facilitation of the world, and our willingness to recklessly exploit the world to feed that facilitation, has yielded a universe in constant, chaotic flux. Shuttling between exacting rigour and utter randomness, Walter's ongoing videographic critique uses the tools of technoculture to puncture that culture's illusions of safety and stability; to force us to meet the enemy and realize that, as is so often the case, the enemy is us.” - Samuel La France, Cinemascope
The film was inspired by an incident in 2014 where a Blue Line train in Chicago failed to stop at its final destination, the O’Hare airport, and eventually came to a stop halfway up the escalator at the airport’s entrance. Terrestrial (2015) re-imagines this accident as an earthbound machine’s failed takeoff.
Screenings:
Toronto International Film Festival
New York Film Festival
FIC Valdivia
Big Ears Music Festival
Images Festival
Indielisboa
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Oak Cliff Film Festival
Roots and Culture, Chicago IL
Hong Kong Arts Centre
The Nightingale Microcinema, Chicago IL
Blind Dates, Rotterdam, NL (special screening curated by Edwin Carels)
Labocine, The Universe is a Simulation
Static Vision - Cursed Signal, Melbourne Australia