INHABIT & WELCOME

By Matthew Holtmeier, Assistant Professor in Film Studies at East Tennessee State University, March 5, 2022

Growing Connections and Building Community

INHABIT: A PERMACULTURAL PERSPECTIVE (2015)

My experience with FLEFF started in 2015. Like many long-time FLEFF participants I have so many memorable experiences that it is hard to pick just one to reflect on.

So instead, I thought of two films that provided quite different experiences for me. The differences between INHABIT: A PERMACULTURAL PERSPECTIVE (2015) and WELCOME (2016) illustrate FLEFF’s breadth and importance.

If you have seen these two films, you might be surprised by my desire to write about them together. “That’s FLEFF,” I’d say. These build community, which is one of the core features of a film festival.

Together they stand at the intersection of celebration and conflict.

INHABIT reveals the unexpected possibilities of growing food in areas where we might not expect permaculture practices to exist. This idea is explored through cinematography that ranges from extreme close ups on plant life to aerial drone photography of urban, suburban, and rural areas. INHABIT celebrates what is possible.

A large crowd attended the screening because an entire section on harvesting mushrooms was filmed locally in Ithaca. The film became a touchstone for the local permaculture community, one example of how FLEFF and film festivals grow local connections and build community.

FLEFF is not just a local festival though, it is a diverse, global festival. In 2018, FLEFF featured a retrospective of Rikun Zhu’s work. FLEFF provided a rare opportunity to screen a number of the Chinese director’s films and then sit down with him to discuss his work

Matthew Holtmeier is author of Contemporary Political Cinema (2019), Assistant Professor in Film Studies at East Tennessee State University, and conference organizer for Film-Philosophy. His research focuses on the production of subjectivity in political and environmental media.

One of his films that really stood out to me was WELCOME which substitutes the complicated micro/macro cinematography of INHABIT with a blank screen.

In WELCOME, Rikun Zhu encounters authorities while filming a documentary in Sichuan. The authorities tell him he is ‘welcome,’ but that he must destroy his footage. Plunging the audience into darkness embodies the authorities’ attempts at censorship while offering a strange vicariousness.

By making a film that could not be seen, Rikun Zhu brings the audience with him into the experience of political filmmaking.

Rikun Zhu’s visit prompted another type of community building. In the post-screening discussion, several audience members, in Mandarin, denounced the portrayal of the People’s Republic of China.

I felt as if this was the greatest celebration of political cinema: it prompted the active negotiation of what it means to be the subject of a state, and our consideration of how that power is exercised directly upon us. This too is an act of building communities.

And so, as I reflect upon my past years participating with FLEFF, the ‘environment’ in the title might mean many things, but for me it addresses one of the most important aspects of the film festival experience, which is the joyful creation of communities through ideas that stimulate and challenge us

FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT