“Here exists no sign, no path, no distance and no time.”

– e.e. cummings, poet

“Artists don’t wonder, ‘What is it good for?’ They aren’t driven to ‘create art,’ or to ‘help people,’ or to ‘make money.’ They are driven to lessen the burden of the unbearable disparity between their conscious and unconscious minds, and so, to achieve peace.”

- David Mamet, playwright, screenwriter, author and filmmaker

When attempting to discuss my vision of HERE over the years, I’ve found it almost impossible to disentangle lines of summary and statement, story and form, biography and approach. Now, as I reach the end of the project’s long gestation period and prepare to bring it into the world, that struggle seems both appropriate and fitting.

I make films that attempt to blur classification, combine traditional methods with experimental approaches, and explore the storytelling and experiential (sound, image and editorial) aspects of the medium. In all of my work, I am trying to find the limits of where film can take a viewer on tonal, emotional and narrative levels. HERE is the culmination of over fifteen years of work in film and photography that has rigorously sought to find those limits - and has then sought to discover new ways to move past them.

On one level, HERE is an attempt to explore the meeting points between prose and poetry, logic and illogic, waking life and the dream - and to look at the ways in which our literal and metaphoric explorations serve to define our personal boundary lines and orient (and disorient) our inner and outer worlds. On another, it’s about uniting the narrative and non-narrative film practices that have so greatly and equally inspired me. On a more literal plane, it’s about mapping a new landscape for the Movies – going out in an effort to bring back new images and tales of unexplored “lands” full of formal and narrative territory we don’t often see (if we see it at all).

All of this has lead me to HERE and its story: a meditation on geography, relationships, time, culture, politics and exploration in the age of GPS, Google Maps and globalization:

What is lost anymore? What is found?

* * *

To say I knew any of this at the outset - to say it was planned - would be a fabrication; HERE is ultimately the result of a long search for a way to bring a few early, abstract feelings about my experiences of the road and the land (and art) into a more structured, tangible form. That much, I suppose, was conscious: I’ve always known that I wanted to make Movies - I just had to make sure that I’d actually like them once I eventually did.
There was no “I’ve got a brilliant idea for a film about a mapmaker” moment. There were endless questions: What is this thing that I feel I must do? How do I give form to this feeling, this tone? How do I move into this narrative structure that I feel so utterly compelled to explore when, at the same time, I feel so skeptical about “story” and the ways in which it so often limits cinematic possibility?

* * *

Luckily, there have been a few intermittent answers. Stories about Armenian culture and geography buried in the New York Times; a friend of a friend who did this crazy job called “ground-truthing”; that first late-night, “let’s ditch this party” discussion with my co-writer, Dani Valent. I have grown to feel a great affinity for Richard Dreyfus’ character, Roy Neary, in Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, sculpting the Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes, shaving cream, garbage - anything he can find - over and over, until he finds his answer. Roy doesn’t know why; he only knows that he must. He’s helping me load up the station wagon for my own trip to the aliens’ landing site in Wyoming right now, saying, “Trust me. The radiation reports are bogus. I can feel it.”

As of this writing, HERE feels like the current point of landing on a journey that began with an earlier film: Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back. Several years after finishing Dutch Harbor, it occurred to me that it contained everything I knew how to express at that point. I put the whole of myself into that project: my experiences with photography; film; playing and recording music; travel; my relationships - all found their place, all were used. HERE feels like the next version, the next chapter of that - or is it just all the same movie? Either way, I’m giving it everything that I have; everything that I currently know how to give.

To answer one practical question: I am not Armenian, nor do I consider HERE to be solely about Armenia, per se. To make a very long story short, the country simply presented itself as the most appropriate landscape and culture in which to set this story. My first visit, in 2004, felt like answers to questions I didn’t even know I was asking. What I found was a unique, cinematically unmapped territory that was home to a culture obsessed with geography, history, poetry, art and film. I couldn’t have made it up if I’d tried, and I became obsessed with how much this unique place had to offer this particular story and the world at large.

I would like to encourage the reader to view all of this material – the photographs, the project summary, the notes on Armenia, everything - as a kind of macro Director’s Statement of its own. Hopefully, all of it reflects something of where HERE has come from - and what the film is ultimately, most truly, about.

Sincerely,

Braden King