All stories begin with a place.  Or rather, the telling of the stories (is there a difference?) begins, whether spoken or not, with this place.  Once upon a time… As if time was first a hill from which the landscape of the story might be viewed, and from which its topography conveyed to the story’s listeners.  And from such a point, with the wind’s message and high light in mind, just as the story surrounds the hill, so the time of the story, its moments, lie also like fields, pastures; its past, present and future exist for the teller as one.  They are all seen, heard and held (that is not to say they are all known by the teller, but she knows them to be present). This is implicitly understood by the audience, who volunteer themselves with smiles to be led by the teller. They are all now. In French this is maintenant, hand holding.

Without break, they walk together. The question then is: in what order shall the story be told, what route shall be taken?

In a programme designed specifically for the festival and Norwich’s singular location, geographically and conceptually, in a landscape of shifting boundaries and fluid thresholds, two film programmes and an extended panel discussion seek to explore the various ways in which the manipulated moving image has responded to the particular pleasures and principles of both the coastal and the interior, those wide open vistas where the horizon is both the measure and the goal, the frame and the aspiration beyond containment. In a suitably hybrid assembly, artist’s film, new video and sound / image collaborations imagine the land and sea into new and surprising forms.
If water wins out, it is only because it does.  Tides rise, land retreats, its statement seeming so firm, so set, when all the time the fluid argument is building, finding its way through, by all means. But this is good, these works after all do not seek the monolithic, in form or content.  They play with openness, with larger cycles of termination and renewal, with seasonal ebb and flow, with a weathering that becomes evidence of both time
and place.

And they never ignore the sky, the one and final, ceaseless vista:  they track its lunar pulses, its constellational narratives.  They understand that scale is everything and always shifting.  They understand that light makes all possible and runs, more even than water, to every corner of the frame. They serve and are served by it. In this way they become prayers and, briefly, their own answers.

And they understand that, just as the geography is an ever changing one, with time a multiple tide, whether meteorological, geological, bodily or emotional, so the means of telling must be multiple, listening and looking always and in all ways for those points of contact, where the story sought and the language spoken find each other, as if lovers separated only by a certain momentary distance, and take the path together, quiet with a certain understanding. Tall tales with a high and reaching gaze, looking over field and wave and then beyond, beyond.

© Gareth Evans 2006
This article originally appeared in the festival catalogue.