A TAKE ON THE AMERICAN FLOWER by Landon Gray
Published March 4th, 2023 Wind Valley pictured in a Manhattan Post-Production Lab
This month, we’re reporting on an emerging filmmaker named Wind Valley who is our new favorite revolutionist from the skies around New York, USA. Once landing down to the pavement and potholes of Loisaida, her real name is P. Melisande LeComer. Particularly, we want to highlight a project of her’s that she will be premiering this year, entitled “The Elocution of Sun Disc.”
The short film is being boasted as a tale for the new “internationalist” world hidden in a story of nature, delusion, and reality testing. A woman is dragged into a man’s rendezvous with the flower that has been haunting his nightmares, and she becomes both a listening vessel and taunting artifact to the man’s obsession and fear regarding the flower and surrounding land. Now, looking further, this is not just a story about a flower. Throughout the film are echoes of speech from French, English, and Mandarin languages that emerge when the sun in the film has any sort of shifts - in color, spatial location, and more. As well as speech, we receive glimpses of musicality and visual symbols representative of the countries in which these languages source. This leaves one to tether these swirling country identities to the relationship between the man, flower, and the sun. The film is then the maze that Wind Valley hoped for, as well as an enrapturing delight to live in for a brief period of time. The design, costuming, and acting is similar to a playful carnival, highlighting an awkward relationship when someone’s delusion strikes itself against posture and seemingly poised demeanor; pigmented oranges, browns, and ballet pinks are against verdant green backdrops. The world has been crafted in an inviting manner, as if it is meant to be overly pleasing. It seems to be a reflection of a time of rapid cultural evolvements, internationally, amidst modern-day, social-based control systems - indicative of an invisible control within online social spaces relative to country relations. The fake nature in Wind's world is treated as real as true nature; it may be the case that the Internet is then a parallel. Color, in a sense, seems to be the dance of variety parallel to these relationships, where it cannot be traced to one sole identity. Yet, there is something about it that feels so potent and culturally loaded within this work. It is concluded by our team at Physical Cinema that this is a must-see work to take in if one receives the opportunity to.
If you have the chance to watch this film once it begins to enter festival circuits and beyond, it is with immense weight that we recommend doing such. It will be interesting to witness the manner this piece of American cinema lands in its own country and beyond.
While this film is stated by the director to be a piece in its own right, she has announced it as the concept film for a feature-length project, currently titled Elocution. The story in the short is meant to “act as both a preface and guide for the larger piece,” Wind says. She, as well, alludes to her work as hopefully not too maze-like to coarse through for some (“it is like that sometimes though,” she notes) and like a light tunnel to others - meaning quite direct in manner. And so, we look forward to encountering her future work in order to receive all of the puzzle pieces of her stories to put together.