Baltimore Women's Film Festival 2009

The life of a garden after dark: Balinese dancers sway on the petals of clematis flowers, Russian singers perform in a calla lilly. In The Nightgardener disparate images that capture an idea about the humanity of the world play on floral screens. The Nightgardner explores the idea of the collective unconscious, which is here symbolically represented as images appropriated from old educational films, that are projected onto garden plants and then re-photographed. This process re-contextualizes the images, connecting film and gardening through the idea of cultivation: the gardener as cultivator of plants, the filmmaker as cultivator of images and ideas. Through projection, disparate images become connected. Found sounds promote associations between the images, creating a new meaning.