Filmmaker Statement

Eden River was an expedition -- our team spent months in Belize following up the legends of a deceased journalist's writing, which led us to long conversations with turtle hunters, medicine women, ritual musicians and subsistence fishermen -- exactly the walks of life depicted in our short. Our method of allowing their realities to permeate our storytelling worked, all the more because of the remoteness of our setting and the cinematic attention our project brought to a little-remembered era of Caribbean history. When I was young, films showed me the world and validated a sense of rapture of being alive. It is my hope to make that contribution onwards with this research-driven immersion into the fascinating spiritualities of Caribbean hunters on the chaotically decolonizing frontiers of the 1960's. Eden River serves as an original, standalone prequel to our crew's adaptation of the novel Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen, currently in development.