Return to: ATA Film & Video Festival 2008: Program 2

Ghosts and Gravel Roads

An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogues the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie skies a visceral, personal encounter is revealed in the solace of open space.

Questions with Mike Rollo

Elizabeth Wing: I see you also work with still photography. Can you tell us about the relationship you've developed between these two ways of looking at things?

Mike Rollo: Ghosts and Gravel Roads is a companion piece to a film I completed four years ago entitled "still / move". Both films explore the history of my family's homesteads rooted from the family album. In "still / move" I was shooting family portraits and snapshots in movement - memory passing in time whereas the landscape was still, trapped in the present. With "Ghosts and Gravel Roads" I was exploring the idea of the photograph as epitaph, commemorating a particular place and time by placing the photographs on decaying buildings. There was also a conscious effort to explore the idea of framing in the film with shots of windows framing the landscape, doors framing a room, etc.

EW: In one section of the film we hear children reciting what sounds like a prayer. What are we hearing?

MR: We are hearing the Lord's Prayer in French. My mother's family is Fransaskois (Francophones living in Saskatchewan) and is deeply committed to the faith of the French Roman Catholic Diocese. The tallest buildings in small Saskatchewan towns were either the church or the grain elevator or both. These buildings played a pivotal role in forming the community. As in the case of my mother’s town the church had a lot of influence. Religious celebrations were well documented. There are family portraits of children praying or photographs involving the celebration of a child's first Eucharist. The Lord's prayer serves two purposes in the film - one being a literal auditory cue from a photograph of children praying and the other is metaphorical, in which the prayer serves as spiritual blessing, a last rite, to the decaying landscape.

EW: The film seems to create a range of shifting moods with a limited palette of figurative images. Much of what we see has a private sensibility. What inspired you to make this film in particular?

MR: The southern Saskatchewan landscape in particular was a motivating factor. You can easily get lost in its vastness and beauty but you can also feel incredibly anxious. The film is a personal journey and my family’s connection to the landscape. There is a delicate balance about my role in the film. I am connected to the photographs only by recognizing the faces and people in the frame, but I don't know the memory beyond the photograph. Therefore I am disconnected from the material and the history physically. Thus my role in the film is to document a present time channeled through images of the past. These communities and landmarks are important for Saskatchewan because it defines a past, a linear trace of a history.

Mike Rollo is a filmmaker and photographer living in Montreal. A founding member of the Double Negative Collective, his films have screened internationally. In 1999, Mike received his BFA in Film Production from the University of Regina and in 2004 he received his MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University where he teaches film production. Ghosts and Gravel Roads, is part of an ongoing study of the Canadian prairie landscape.

Last updated 09/09/2008.