Genre
Synopsis
Emery, a botanist from the Navajo Nation, looks out over a shuttered Glen Canyon Dam, shocked to see a dry Lake Powell before her eyes. She drives towards the Colorado River passing lines of cars headed from West to East. Emery arrives at Lee’s Ferry and meets Noah and Floyd, the two developers from Hydro Electric Company who she is tasked with signing off on their project. Accompanying them are Jordan, the for hire commercial captain who will run their motorized boat down river and Kendall his skipper. The group descends into the canyon, and Emery starts to see a lone boatman, Glen, in dated clothes rowing an old-fashioned wood dory down the river. She also sees signs of a mountain lion stalking the area. As they descend deeper and deeper into the canyon, each person has a story to tell and their connection to the place and why they are there, seems to be more than a mere coincidence.
Bio
Emilie Upczak is an independent filmmaker, academic, an Andy Warhol grant recipient and a Rotterdam Producers Lab alumni. She has her MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work focuses on climate justice, migration, and economic, racial and gender hierarchies. Her films reflect her interest in hybridity, blending fiction and non-fiction techniques, and highlighting actors and non-actors. She makes narrative, experimental, and non-fiction films and works with archival footage and collections. Her films range from feature length narratives to public video projections to digital exhibitions.
Emilie spent ten years living in Trinidad and Tobago, where she began making films and worked as the Creative Director for the trinidad+tobago film festival spearheading the Caribbean Film Database and the Caribbean Film Mart. Her debut narrative feature “Moving Parts”, a human smuggling and sex trafficking film, set in the capital city of Port of Spain, premiered at the Denver Film Festival and is available through the films distributor, Indiepix.
In 2022, she wrote and directed a narrative short film entitled “Silt”, a story of loss centered on the Colorado river, which premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston where it won the special jury award and went on to receive a Federal Emergency Management Agency Climate Resilience Storytelling Award. “Silt” also screened at the Smithsonian Institute Mother Tongue Film Festival.
Awards History
Independent Film Festival Boston 2022 - Special Jury Award
Credits
Producer - John Otterbacher
