Searching for Dragons is a feature documentary film exploring our connection to a sacred natural world. Travelling from the Arctic Circle to Panama over five years, filmmaker Daniel Gainsford explores our sacred connection to nature and examines how our civilization, now moving beyond the Industrial Age, needs to overcome barriers of complexity in order to adapt towards a new paradigm.
(The original scope of this project has widened significantly since the project's inception. The road has led to new content, new ways of seeing and very few clear or simple answers. Although the original statement still holds true, it is meant more as a point of departure. In the end, the artist will delve into this expansive content as a sculptor with chisel, and from the continent itself, the final work will emerge.)
Background
This project had been in development for five years, before production actually began. The original concept emerged in Costa Rica in 2001 when Ottawa filmmaker Dan Gainsford found a Central American site where a rock had been weathered to resemble a large sleeping dragon. The serendipity and circumstance surrounding the experience moved him to begin an indepth exploration into the human connection to the earth and our place within its nature.
The Road
The film will capture a modern pilgrimage down the centerline of the North American continent. This specific method is fuelled by the filmmaker's interest in sacred pilgrimages: the road to Mecca, the road to Lourdes, the road to Rome, and the road to Santiago. For this project the journey south will commence in Canada's North West Territories in Ulukhaktok (Holman) on Victoria Island far north of the Arctic Circle. From this location the filmmaker will travel south through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica before finally ending at the Panama Canal.
Nature & City
This film project is largely about rural and natural spaces rather than busy urban environments, for this reason the journey will exclude urban centers with the exception of a short stint in Los Angeles, California. An intentional move by the filmmaker, Los Angeles has been selected to provide some contrast to the film's natural environments while also providing an extreme representation of North American popular culture. The absence of the urban environment throughout the journey is intended to disconnect the filmmaker from urban life, with only occasional contact through online journal entries and photographs.
"Marshall McLuhan told us to think of all technology in environmental terms because of the way it envelops us and becomes difficult to perceive. From morning to night we walk through a world that is totally manufactured, a creation of human invention. We are surrounded by pavement, machinery, gigantic concrete structures. Automobiles, airplanes, computers, appliances, television, electric lights, artificial air, have become the physical universe with which our senses interact. They are what we touch, observe and react to. They are themselves "information," in that they shape how we think and, in the absence of an alternate reality ( I.e. nature), what we think about and know." - Jerry Mander - In The Absence of the Sacred
Guerrilla Filmmaking
As this film project is a low budget venture, the crew will be a limited to the filmmaker and, at times, one assistant filmmaker. The entire production will be guerrilla in nature, with the crew living out of a single GMC 2500 Rally Van. This van will act as a home for the duration of the project expedition, forcing a life lived modestly with any extra dollars going towards the essentials of food, fuel and film stock.
Influences
Searching for Dragons is very much influenced by the life and films of Frank Cole, and it will be somewhat similar in aesthetic style. Frank traveled the Sahara in search of his own dragons and built a life around his filmmaking and personal process. Dan Gainsford is working towards similar goals as a filmmaker by documenting his journey of viewing and understanding our world. He is working to create a dreamlike visionary experience built of disjointed framents of our seemingly unreal reality.
You can read more about Frank Cole at: http://www.cfi-icf.ca/cole_04.html
Other influences include the works of filmmakers Dan Sokolowski, John Kneller, Korbett Matthews and Bridget Farr.