PilgrIMAGE
Year: 2009
Running Time: 85 mins Canada / Colour
Directed by: Peter Wintonick
With: Mira Burt-Wintonick
A father, Peter Wintonick, and his 19-year-old daughter, Mira, both filmmakers, take a cinematic roadtrip around the world. They trek through the present and future of film and image-making, using significant contemporary and historical cinematic sites and personal encounters as their points of departure. pilgrIMAGE is a trans-generational, cine-genetic meditation on media and its personal and social consequences. Equal parts verité film-journal, digital-diary and ciné-blog, through a series of Socratic father-daughter dialogues, gleaned from years of inter-continental film-gypsy journeys, they meet other renowned film 'pilgrims' and media practitioners. The goal is to transfer a bit of crazy wisdom between father and his daughter. From a renowned documentarian of cinema's Generation Why? to those of the next-wave Generation D (as in digital) era.
PilgrIMAGE is a populist but personal inter-generational journey into movies, media and image-making. It is a series of interlocking video journals, and back and forth exchanges of video-diaries, videogrammes and video-blogs, constructed as short two-minute scenes shared between a father and daughter, Peter Wintonick and Mira Burt-Wintonick, as they travel. These modules capture dialectic and aesthetic dialogue, and critical point-of-view arguments. From two generational view-points, we are drawn into two different spheres of separate cinematic and media interests, ranging from documentary, fiction and activism, including the Internet and nextmedia. These video journals are object lessons and life lessons. They consist of direct-into-camera meditations and personal and philosophical musings. They are over-laid and illustrated by a collage and montage of public domain archives and filmclips, photos, graphics, clip art and short words of advice and aphorisms from interviewed filmmakers and new media practitioners.
Peter tries to convey his mediated obsessions to Mira and her generation: the history of image-making, propaganda, documentary, activism, illusion, ethics and the social use of media. This is accomplished by intertwining personal, political, cinematographic and social influences. In her mediated diaries, Mira, who is now a teen-ager pursuing communications studies in Montreal, conveys both to Peter and the viewing audience, how her generation sees, uses, consumes and produces movies and media. Mira is now at the beginning of her own creative, media and filmmaking life. She takes an active and skeptical view of mass media by looking to alternatives. She is learning how to make media by using the process of making this film. They travel together for some of their film-world journey. Then, by laws of gravity, like all travelers, they separate for a while. Eventually, their orbits bring them back home to Montreal, together again, armed with common hope and dreams and wild, cinematic wisdom.