Tending The Orchard: Bill Basquin, Alison O’Daniel & Rodrigo Reyes
The first edition of BAY VISIONS: A new, ongoing series spotlighting local filmmakers!
Join the Roxie community for an afternoon of films and conversation with three Bay Area filmmakers who will share a program of their short non-fiction films. Tending the Orchard – taken from the one of Bill Basquin’s films of the same name – explores the complexities and nuances of relationships impacted by separation and access, the collective desires to communicate and share intimacy and the dynamic interplay between land, identity and history. Using the medium to experiment with form, sound, and imagery provides the connective tissues that bring these films together for the first time. Even more, their curiosity to explore storytelling possibilities opens up and invites new perceptions and experiences of the world around us.
Curated by Gina Basso, in collaboration with the Roxie Theater and the filmmakers with a post show Q&A!
Bill Basquin was born in Indiana, United States and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Basquin’s films have shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah; Documenta in Kassel, Germany; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York; and the Lab in San Francisco, California. Basquin teaches ecological restoration and works with trees and fire on a landscape scale.
Alison O’Daniel is a Los Angeles and Bay Area visual artist and filmmaker working across sound, moving image, sculpture, installation and performance. O’Daniel (who is d/Deaf) explores individual and subjective relationships to sound and explores the possibilities of the film medium. Her filmmaking considers how her work might be experienced by different audiences, opening up new avenues for experimentation with textures of sound and the materiality of storytelling. In her films, she reimagines for audiences what a film can be and how different audiences might perceive it. Her debut feature film, The Tuba Thieves, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023.
Born in Mexico City, director Rodrigo Reyes makes films deeply grounded in his identity as an immigrant artist, crafting a poetic gaze from the margins of both cultures, using striking imagery to portray the contradictory nature of our shared world, while revealing the potential for transformative change.
Works in the program include but are not limited to:
Martin (2004) 5 minutes Digital video sound/bw
Director: Bill Basquin, USA
Martin is a portrait of rancher and sheep shearer Martin Denton with his philosophical musings on rural life.
Deer Census (2009) 8 minutes 30 seconds Digital video sound/color
Director: Bill Basquin, USA (Country of production: New Zealand)
Deer Census is composed entirely of digital still images recorded by a consumer-grade infrared motion-sensor camera that was purchased at a sporting goods store. The images were recorded and given to me by Nathan Bridgeman, who is the speaking voice that you hear in this piece. Location: Midland, TX; USA.
Tending the Orchard (2023) 7 minutes 23 seconds. Digital video, sound/color
Directors: Bill Basquin (USA), Katherine Agard (Trinidad and Tobago, USA)
The directors find that a collaboration around the orchard initiated by Bill brings up history, anger, colonial violence, and the chance to feel the closeness of relationship. This video is a part of an ongoing conversation around the legacies and forms of settler colonialism, including challenging the trope of the non-white person being the subject, rather than the person having the gaze, opinion and directorial input. This conversation is a longer conceptual work that challenges both directors.
The Plants Are Protected (2013), 12 min. Digital video, sound/color
Director: Alison O’Daniel, USA
The Plants Are Protected is part of a complex, gradually unfolding film project that resulted in her feature length film, the award winning festival favorite, The Tuba Thieves, a collaboration between the filmmaker, composers, Deaf athletes, musicians and performers. In this longrunning project, O’Daniel highlights acts of listening and aural transformation and worked with Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim to respond to several aural and visual references. As the plants are stored away in the back of a truck, they move, sway and hum in rhythmic dialogue along with [yellow captions] that both describe the sounds and present questions to the viewer.
The Kaleidoscopic Window (2018), 5 min 42 sec. Digital video sound/color
Director: Alison O’Daniel, USA
Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim, and composer of one of the scores for The Tuba Thieves, signs the final scene in which the main character, Nyke, goes skinny dipping with her boyfriend Nature Boy. Three narrative versions of the story unfold simultaneously—the written screen-play, a version told by Christine in American Sign Language, and a voiceover reciting the exact English translation of Christine’s teleprompter notes.
Abuelos (2020) 8 minutes 54 seconds. Digital video sound/color
Director: Rodrigo Reyes, USA
Separated by years of immigration policy, a young girl dreams of meeting her grandmother for the first time. Thanks to the bi-national cooperation of governments on both sides of the US/Mexico border, her grandmother embarks on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to reunite with her undocumented loved ones.ate. Official Selections: San Francisco International Film Festival and Mill Valley Film Festival.
After the Raid (2019), 24 min. Digital video, sound/color
Director: Rodrigo Reyes, USA
In the aftermath of a large immigration raid in a conservative small town in East Tennessee the emotional fallout opens up far-reaching questions about justice, faith and humanity. What happens when rhetoric becomes reality, and a community is forced to re-examine the values of the gospel and ideas about ‘community’ itself?
