Heavy Water – tales from an empty city

Synopsis: It all starts with a crack in the cement at the buried nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine and ends in the abandoned city of Montreal. There, an independent but amnesiac woman and a solitary blind-man man meet. They share a bottle of water. That night they become lovers. At dawn, their solitude is broken when a stranger arrives at the door. Thus begins a tale of three people and their quest to set the air right.

Heavy Water – tales from an empty city is the film component of a larger research project that is funded in part by The Kodak Faculty Scholars Award, which I received in 2005. The award is funded by the Eastman Endowment and administered by the Film and Video Foundation based in the US. The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University also supports the project.

The film will be shot in black and white, 35mm using both camera and lab print stocks. The genre is science fiction. The intention is to find an aesthetic that contributes to a harmonious relationship between style and content. There is almost no dialogue and the film will be shot using a MOS 35mm camera. I am also experimenting with pinhole cinematography for the film – see the clip.

Some of the footage will be hand-processed and then follow a traditional analog film editing. The production of the film is designed to test the feasibility of ultra low budget filmmaking culminating in the completion of a finished 35mm film.

The process rejects the concept of a digital intermediate and is meant to re-establish the notion of discipline and craft into the filmmaking process. If successful, I plan to implement this working path as an option for students to take in my film production courses at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema.