Project Overview
The Ark is a 20 minute experimental film made in response to our collective filmmaking experiment called Shared Process, launched in April 2020, at the beginning of the mandate to shelter in place.
When the world shut down in spring 2020, we asked ourselves: As socially-engaged artists, what value might we offer to our community (and ourselves) in this time? Our collective praxis positioned us to meet two emergent needs: first, a space for grieving, secondly, a space for meaningful self-expression.
Shared Process was carved out at the intersection of these needs. It was designed as a container for participants to parse out the emotions of the pandemic, the layers of loss (ambiguous and/or acute grief) through a series of filmmaking exercises. We designed Shared Process with six guiding principles:
Invite curiosity into the familiar. As many of us reckoned with the repetition of life in isolation, we wanted to foster a foundation of curiosity for our physical environments and the emotional landscape we occupied.
Celebrate all questions and experiences. Affirm the validity of all experiences within this time. We expand our personal empathetic capacity by truly encountering our own suffering.
Model the expression of vulnerability we seek from our community. We were not just the project facilitators; we too were participants.
Accessibility. Free and open to all, no prior filmmaking experience necessary, no expensive equipment needed!
Make it low stakes. Encourage people to make a microfilm per week and then move on.
Honor this experiment. As an artist collective, we committed to creating a film that responded to the material generated in Shared Process as a way of honoring and continuing to learn from Shared Process.
Developing The Ark
Driven by that sixth guiding principle, we spent nine months watching, rewatching, and questioning the meaning of the material generated in Shared Process and the significance of this filmmaking experiment.
Two “texts” serve as the foundation for The Ark. The first “text” is a collection of the film submissions from Shared Process. We felt a potent gestalt in this collection of films that, when viewed together, convey both the magnitude of our collective loss and the unprecedented experience of isolation caused by the pandemic. The other primary text in The Ark is the myth of Noah and the Great Flood, one of the most salient, apocalyptic stories in the Jewish tradition.
As filmmakers, we wanted to play with different modes of relating to the films submitted to Shared Process. In chapter 1 of the film, we play with letting the works speak for themselves, uplifting a multiplicity of perspectives and authors, an approach that we consistently employ in our collective’s devised work. In the prologue and chapter 2 of The Ark, we collage the Shared Process submissions and remix the material with extended writing generated by us (Well of Wills) as the primary authors of the film.
As creators of “Jewish art,” our research process always involves text-based study, accessing ancient Jewish text to uncover and reclaim wisdom for our time, while also using the text as a point of departure for our own imagination. We saw immediate parallels between our journey through the pandemic and the journey of Noah in the myth. We recognized that our arks were not only our homes that kept us in, but the mental state we found ourselves in, and the process of this workshop series, too was an ark. We found ourselves going through waves and storms of emotions.
The final result is The Ark, a hybrid documentary carried by multiple narrators and crafted to feel like an extended stream of consciousness, told in three chapters with a prologue.