Overview

The seaside as a cloudy apparition... a roll of 16mm film shot once in 2008 rewound and re-shot in 2010... 'John Price’s The Sea Series: Landfall in Lilliput is beautiful example of the diary format. He breaks even further with documentary tradition, showing us silent images of children playing and layering them with a document of clouds. With no verbal narrative or other contextualization, we are left to discover the author’s meaning and truth for ourselves. To do this we must examine our own cultural signifiers and internal constructs to discover the film’s meaning. For this reason, it might be the most Canadian documentary because we take it to mean whatever we’d like to – and as Canadians, we will read into it our own Canadian stories.' Melanie Wilmink: Canadian Diaries Programmer's Notes.