Like a Stone or Flower
Kaiya J.
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"like a stone or flower" encompasses a period of exploration within my filmmaking journey - utilizing documentary as an experimental method of storytelling and allowing myself to let the narrative flow naturally out of ideas stemming from conversations between myself and the artists I interviewed. During post-production for "like a stone or flower," I struggled with pulling a mere five minutes from the nine hours of interviews I had collected. The documentary's narrative felt like a living being in a perpetual state of evolution, always dancing out of my grasp. After weeks of listening, re-listening, and painstakingly cutting the interviews, I found myself with a collection of moments in my conversations with the artists that had resonated deeply with my own creative experience, shifted my perspective, or put into words a concept or feeling I could not. The documentary’s narrative ended up being about the artists reflecting on the ability of art to go beyond logic and language, a concept I came to realize I, too, was grappling with. The film combines the artists’ personal work with various mediums, such as video collage, cyanotypes, and universally recognized artworks, to help concretize the abstract ideas of 'what is art?' and 'how does it hold meaning across different people and generations?'.
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Creativity is freedom, the ability to grow boundlessly, film. Filmmaking allows me to tell the full extent of every story, capture every detail, and show time, growth, and most importantly, change. Video, to me, isn’t simply freezing a moment in time, but relishing it, transforming it, and growing with it.
