Summoning

Thomas Javier Castillo - 2019

Length 05:05

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Summoning is a short experimental film about landscape, body, spirit, and ceremony. The film transposes the highly manipulated landscapes of agricultural northwest Ohio with a very loose, thematic narrative of ritual and communion, where the physical and tangible engage with the mental and spiritual as the character seeks a “third space”. The question took me a long time to unpack, but essentially the film asks the following question; “Are there no more spirits?”. I would hardly call the film religious in any sort of scriptural sense, but perhaps it suggests a pidgin, rusty, ad-hoc mysticism beneath the power lines and above the gas pipelines. It approaches an environmentalist perspective, one that has no illusions about untouched nature but rather looks for intersections of the human and the mechanical with the tierra.