18,000 Dead in Gordon Head

In the summer of 1982, during a visit to the filmmaker’s hometown, he witnessed the murder of a teenage girl – killed by a sniper on a quiet, suburban street, in the middle of the afternoon. He returned a year later to lie with his camera on the spot where she died, and to roam the neighbourhood searching for footage. As remarkable as the girl’s sudden death was, the young filmmaker also found it devastatingly normal. He’d, already seen it, thousands of times. '18,000 Dead in Gordon Head' is a treatise on the omnipresence of violence in contemporary culture, even (or some would say especially) in the banal context of a Canadian suburb. Composed as a poem, the final work is a hybrid of several film stocks and video formats, processed to create a kinetic, lyrical collage of textures, loops, rhythms and visual rhymes, and in the end finally completing the work’s cycle back to its originally intended film format.