Geographies of Solitude: A Remarkable Life at the Beach
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
The Canadian documentary Geographies of Solitude won three awards at the last Berlin Film Festival, as well as best Canadian film at Hot Docs and prizes at several other festivals. It marks an auspicious feature debut from filmmaker Jaqueline Mills.
Unquestionably, it’s a beautiful film, shot in 16 mm, with grainy, almost tactile, images and sounds. There is an inky sky, strewn with stars; the silhouette of a horse, mane blowing in the wind, water droplets and scampering bugs, the rustling of the wind and the rumble of waves. It weaves together themes of women’s life choices, our fraught relationship to nature, the art of archiving and the power of awe.
The place is Sable Island (in French, île de Sable, literally “island of sand”), a crescent-shaped sandbar, 300 kms (190 miles) southeast of Halifax in the Atlantic Ocean, about 26 miles long and less than a mile across.
The island is home to about 500 wild horses, colonies of grey seals, and nesting birds. Often fog-bound, it has been the site of hundreds of shipwrecks over the centuries and has been a source of fascination for writers and filmmakers over the years.
The protagonist in the film is a woman in her early seventies, often seen from behind or at a distance, carrying a notebook and binoculars, as she tramps across the sand dunes. Her name is Zoe Lucas, and she has been living on the island for more than 40 years.
While various Parks Canada personnel and researchers work there seasonally, Lucas is the island’s longest permanent resident, a self-trained naturalist who is the documenter of changes on the island: the 500 or so horses, their dung and bones, the colonies of grey seals and their pups, the nesting birds and their stomach contents, the beetles and plants and the human garbage that blows in with the wind and sea. On a spreadsheet, she chronicles and decodes dozens of minute events, an exercise both obsessive and scientific.
Lucas, who took a Master of Fine Arts degree, first came to the island at age 21 on a free airplane ride to look at the horses. She returned as a volunteer cook with a seal-tracking study. She became awe-addicted and devoted to chronicling the island’s changes.
Currently, she’s the chair of the non-profit Sable Island Institute, a Halifax-based organization that supports and promotes the protection and conservation of the island. Among the many things she counts: ribbons from balloons at birthday parties, and political rallies from decades past that have made their way to the island.
The who-why-what-where information, the prosaic documentary stuff, filters in gradually and in fragments. There are archival images, voiceover from a 2015 public lecture, scenes of Lucas as a younger woman (a clip from Jacques Cousteau’s 1982 film, St Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea) and back to the present. The film drifts, and eddies, like water or sand.
Occasionally, it blurs experimental abstraction in sequences that have separate titles, as Mills plays with environmental materials to create the images. There’s “Horse Hair,” “Bones and Sand,” “Exposed in Starlight,” “Developed in Seaweed,” “Film Buried in Horse Dung,” “Developed in Yarrow.”
We are informed that the noises of insects and worms provided the musical score to the film, presumably via sampled sounds through a synthesizer.
We hear Lucas interacting off-camera with the filmmaker in an inter-generational dialogue about the environment, choice, and mortality. Lucas rejects the idea that she chose this existence, seeing it rather as the result of circumstances.
While this is strange and wonderful, the prosaic-minded among us might wish for a few more concrete information. We never see the island’s keeper dealing with the other people who visit the island, which I assume she does. We do not know how she disposes of her own waste, how often she has food brought in from the mainland, how she gets medical care or whether she surfs the web or listens to the radio at night.
Ultimately, it seems to me, this personal film is about finding a vocation in the world. As the poet Gary Snyder wrote in his 1974 book, Turtle Island, “Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility.”
Geographies of Solitude. Directed by Jaqueline Mills. With Zoe Lucas. Now screening in Charlottetown, PEI, City Cinema; Edmonton, Metro; Montreal, Cinema du Parc; Montreal, Cinema du Musee; Toronto, Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema, Vancouver, Van City; Waterloo, Princess Cinema; and Williams Lake, BC, Williams Lake Film Club.