WINDWARD

Filmed on Fogo Island, Windward unfolds across the landscape –its distinctive geological formations, climate, and austere beauty – through delicate portrayals of youth.

Jean-Marie Straub liked to recall D. W. Griffith’s regret that cinema had lost ‘the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.’ As its title suggests, Sharon Lockhart’s latest film has no shortage of wind. But there is not a tree in sight. We are on the spray-battered coast of Fogo, off the coast of Newfoundland: landscapes of bare rock, lichens, moors and peat bogs where salty gusts prevent trees from taking root.

This is the second consecutive film Lockhart has shot on an island. In Eventide, there is no wind, but rather the calm of a long shot taken at dusk: children scattered across a beach search among the pebbles in the darkness. Their meticulous search takes place underneath a boundless sky; the glow from the torches of their phones, which they use to light up the ground, responds to the appearance of stars and meteors.

Composed of twelve tableaux that last approximately five minutes each, Windward revisits, in a daytime, everyday setting, this same relationship between a landscape that is subject to the elements and tiny silhouettes whose playful actions allow the viewer to experience the contours of the location and the dimensions of the shot. As is often the case with Lockhart, the film’s protagonists are children who have been left to their own devices: one flies a kite, others walk on stilts, cut through tall grass or bathe in a calm sea at dusk.

This interest in their games evokes The Children of Fogo Island, one of the participatory films shot in the same location by Canadian documentary filmmaker Colin Low as part of a community development experiment that went down in history in the late 1960s, known as the Fogo Process. But in Lockhart’s film, co-creation does not involve the exchange of cameras: it is more a matter of mutual giving and shared sensitivity. The rules, repetitions and interactions specific to the game structure the space; slowness creates the conditions for observation. Yet this is not a distant gaze: it becomes an act of attention through which cinema restores the fullness of their duration to the people and things filmed.

Antoine Thirion