Filmmaker Statement

How do you make a film of a poem that doesn't exist -- or at least doesn't exist in its entirety? The poetry of the ancient Greek poet Sappho exists only as a series of mysterious, intense fragments, with lines like "no speaking is left in me," "silvery," "because I prayed...this word:...I want." I've always been drawn to these lines, in part because of their mystery, so I wanted to try to use the fragmentary nature of these poems as a starting point for a fragmented cinematic structure. I pulled a set of lines I thought would work well together from Anne Carson's excellent Sappho translation and wove them into a script so that the disparate pieces come together over the course of the film, at the same time as the two music tracks weave together and the two fragmented perspectives of the story begin to unite.