Film Show 053: Sharon Lockhart
An interview with the American filmmaker about pushing beyond the black box theater, depicting labor on film, and her new feature 'WINDWARD' (2025)
Sharon Lockhart
Sharon Lockhart (1964) is an artist born in Norwood, Massachusetts and based in Los Angeles. Throughout her decades-long career, Lockhart has created films and installations deeply invested in collaboration and community, inviting others to share in the fabric of her works’ stories, politics, choreographies, and more. Her debut feature, 1997’s Goshogaoka, is a masterpiece of structuralist filmmaking involving a middle school girls basketball team in suburban Japan. Over an hour, one witnesses striking dance routines that display Lockhart’s investment in revealing the beauty in the everyday. Her response to the work was Teatro Amazonas (1999), which features a static long take of an audience in the titular opera house in Manaus, Brazil.
Her films would continue to expand thereafter, often featuring different iterations for theatrical and gallery settings, and involving portraits or paintings or physical ephemera to accompany their overarching ideas. NŌ (2003), for example, was inspired by landscape paintings and ikebana, and Lockhart consequently produced multiple photographic prints of neatly arranged vegetation. Lunch Break (2008) is composed of a tracking shot across a corridor in Maine’s Bath Iron Works, and she made multiple newspapers, books, installations, and photograph series in relation to the work that touch on labor.
Throughout the following ten years, Lockhart would create multiple works filmed in Poland, including Podwórka (2009), which focuses on children and play, and Rudzienko (2016), which was made in collaboration with the Youth Center for Sociotherapy in the titular village. More recently, Lockhart made EVENTIDE (2022), a non-narrative film that conjures drama from choreographed movements within a dark landscape. Her newest work is WINDWARD (2025), and it provides contemplative meditations on geography and geology as children gambol across different spaces on Fogo Island. The film has its world premiere at this year’s New York Film Fest, playing both today (September 27th) and tomorrow (September 28th). More info can be found here. An installation of the work is on view at the Fogo Island Gallery until October 31st. The exhibition will travel to the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and will be presented there from October 22nd to January 7th, 2026.
Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Lockhart in person at her Los Angeles studio on February 20th, 2023. The two decided to postpone publishing the interview until the time was right. Recently, Kim sent emails to Lockhart about her newest film WINDWARD, which have been edited into the below transcript. Throughout the conversation, Kim and Lockhart discuss her childhood, her mother’s eye, finding ways to push beyond the black box theater, and the ideas animating numerous films from throughout her career.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What memories come up when you think about your childhood and the space you were raised in?
Sharon Lockhart: Nature, my cousins, a lot of time outside.
Where were you born?
I’m from Maine and Massachusetts.
Is there anything that stands out about spending time with your cousins? Or were you often out exploring on your own?
We grew up on the coast, and so a lot of time was spent at the ocean—I was always swimming — and in the Maine woods. There were always people coming in and out of our house, we always had someone living and staying with us from all over. My mother’s longtime boyfriend was in construction, so he traveled a lot and somehow these people would come back with him and live with us for six months, a few years… they became part of the family. So it was a bit chaotic.
Was that a positive thing for you?
It was what it was. Looking back, it seems kind of crazy—most families don’t do that. But it definitely informed who I am. There were always spontaneous events at my mom’s, and nothing was really predictable. I liked learning about the people who came and about where they were from. They were different.
Are there certain qualities of your mom you see in yourself?
Her eye has definitely informed how I see and how I frame. I did not realize this until 1994 when we were going through photos at her house. Almost all the photos of me have my back to the camera looking out at the landscape. She didn’t have any art training, we didn’t go to museums—I didn’t go to museums until I was in my 20s—but she had these reproductions around the house that were like watered-down Dutch painting, or German Romanticism. She had a good eye. She could also spot things at the dump.
Right now, I’m looking at those jugs over there (points at whiskey jugs). I just incorporated them into a still-life photograph I made honoring Mike Kelley. I never really thought about them in our home growing up but when researching vessels for the photo, I realized they were perfect for it. They are utilitarian, imperfect and handmade. They held whiskey—a substance that undermined social control. It spoke to how Mike worked against a typical sense of order.
What would your mom bring from the dump?
I remember she found an amazing old dresser. She took it home and sanded it and brought it back to life. She could see the beauty in things that others couldn’t. I think that became part of my practice.
Was there a specific moment when you recognized that you needed to pursue art?
Yeah, definitely. I was around 21. This is a good example of my mother’s boyfriend bringing someone home… I went back for Thanksgiving and there was this guy who did construction with him there. He had to leave early to get back to Boston because he was taking a class at the New England School of Photography. And I thought, “You can go to school for photography?” For the first time, I thought about going to study.
I got together a portfolio and a year later I enrolled at the school. It was a two-year technical school. I started with a 4x5 camera and black-and-white film as part of the Zone System, and a required class on the history of photography. In the second year, I had a color photography course and the teacher introduced me to conceptual photographers like Jim Welling and Sherrie Levine. I would say that was my introduction to art and the reason I went on to get an undergrad and grad degree. As soon as I was turned on to art, it was a clear path.
It’s wonderful that it only took knowing this was a thing that existed for you to be on this track. Sometimes you don’t even realize the things that are possible in life, and you just need to know it exists for things to happen.
I am so grateful to that man for telling me about the photography school! My family is working-class and did not go to college so there wasn’t this belief at a young age we could go to college either. People just brought up their kids and those kids went on to do whatever they went on to do. There wasn’t an expectation.
You mentioned you took the conceptual photography class.
It wasn’t a conceptual photography class, it was a color photography class.
Do you remember your teacher’s name?
Tom Pettit.
Was there anything he said or did pedagogically that stood out and made you more excited about this?
He sent us out in the world to see exhibitions. I went a lot to the Photographic Resource Center. I’m trying to remember whose shows were up there when I went. I remember there being Sophie Calle and Barbara Kruger. It was my first time seeing full bodies of work, seeing how someone installed, and how one body of work leads to the next, eventually coming together over a career. I saw how the work could evolve, and was able to think of it as part of an artist’s practice.
That’s beautiful. I think a lot about, especially as a music writer, how hermetic the medium can feel. There are musicians who do stuff outside of music, but a lot of music fans are oblivious to the rest of it. I’m sure there are tons of people who know your films, but don’t realize that your films have other accompanying materials. How important is it for you that the people who engage with your work are privy to all these other things? Do you ever get stressed about the fact that your work can just exist isolated from your entire body of work, or from the other materials that accompany your films?
One thing I’ve always tried to push against is the tendency to pigeonhole artists within their practices and within the kinds of work that they make. When I first started out, photography had its own little world with galleries devoted just to that medium. The Pictures Generation really exploded that. There was also the avant-garde cinema world and all those guys would show in the film-festival circuit but never in galleries or museums. I think there are a lot of artists from my generation who just moved easily between mediums. I try to make different media work against each other; so the photographs, for example, address a similar subject matter in a very different way. I also try to make each project take the work in some new direction.
Like for EVENTIDE (2022), I did a series of cyanotype paintings. And I’ve been working with bronze for the past years in relation to photography. Whenever I do exhibitions and installations with my films, I always think about the architecture, and how I can push beyond the black box. I’ve worked with architects for decades to create these installations. When I’m making films, I’m thinking about architecture and how the viewer’s body moves through space. So, yes, I do hope people engage the larger bodies of work. But your question was…
How do you feel about people who don’t engage with your work in that way?
Everyone experiences work in their own way and I can only try to frame things to create a context that bridges all parts of my practice. The film audience and the art audience are definitely different though.
What do you think are the differences between those two audiences?
The cinema audience experiences the work collectively while the other audience views the work individually and on their own terms. I’ve always been in those two worlds, and I like that they’re different. You get different feedback. But to fully understand what I’m doing, you have to engage the whole—my films always have that other component in galleries or museums.
Before Goshogaoka (1997) you had Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence (1994).
That was my thesis film—my first film.
I actually didn’t even realize that you had that film until recently.
Looking back, I can appreciate it and how it informs later work—it was a structural film, and it thought about the clinical and the observational, but in a tender way. I think Goshogaoka was the first time that I was really thinking about a cinematic audience though.
I’m curious, what made you focus on Cassavetes?
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) is such a great film. What interested me about it most was how the child is taking care of the parent. That’s the scene I chose to rewrite and restage. I also find the way Cassavetes worked with children in his films to be unique. Same with Truffaut.
I just watched Goshogaoka again and what you’re saying about it informing your other work was really obvious to me. I think something that is clear in a lot of your work is the way we as people animate the space around us when we move. I love when the girls are running across the gym in the beginning and we see the curtain rustles.
Oh yeah, I love that too. For me it announces that the film is fiction in a very subtle way. The two farmers in NŌ (2003) do that too, as do the workers in Lunch Break (2008), the clam digger in Double Tide (2009), just to name a few.
I remember first seeing Goshogaoka and wondering, is this a pure document of what’s actually happening? But by the end of the film you realize, “Okay, there’s no way this could have been that.” What drew you to making the film in this way? There are so many specific parameters that you set, and then within those parameters you really allow this space to come alive. Could we talk about the planning of the choreography?
I studied the girls’ practices for months and determined that I wanted an hour-long film with a fixed frame, and that I wanted six 10-minute sections (the duration of a 400-foot magazine). Questioning whether or not it was a documentary was inspired by ethnofiction films. I introduced the fiction through choreographing the exercises for the camera. We also had three costume changes. I was looking at a lot of post-modern dance and Yvonne Rainer at the time too. I think the gymnasium speaks to that and to everyday movement.
I knew right away when I saw them in the gym in front of the raised stage that it was the perfect setting for me to make a film about looking at—and gaining an understanding of—a culture outside of my own. I hired Stephen Galloway from the Frankfurt Ballet for the choreography, made costumes, and all of that.
How enmeshed were you with these girls at that school? When I think about Jean Rouch, I think about how he allowed his subjects to participate in the film itself. I’m curious how that played out for you with that film. I’m assuming you don’t speak Japanese.
This was the first time I worked in another country and with a large group. The families were very involved. Some of the parents even sewed the costumes. I remember explaining my concept to so many people. It was interesting how important that is in Japan—making sure that all the details of something are laid out. I was young and it was really great for me that I had to explain my concept again and again. I became clearer about my ideas each time. Even so, I don’t know if the girls really understood until they saw the film a year later. Since then, the way I interact with the people I work with has all become more and more in-depth. I really get to know them and we develop lifelong friendships.
When the students learned Stephen was going to choreograph them I think they thought they would learn dance moves! Instead, we choreographed their everyday movements, things they did all the time. And it was a surprise for them that the film wasn’t really about basketball. We also built in moments of chance the day we filmed by changing some of the movements they had rehearsed for ten days. So that took them by surprise too.
Do you mind talking about what it was like for them to see the film? I assume all the families came.
Yes, the whole community came. It was a big theater. And I remember after, it really felt like everyone got it. With all my films, the participants know the frame, they understand the concept, they know what the camera is seeing at all points. But that’s only part of it, until they see how everything comes together. I also think hearing the soundtrack in the cinema, and the fact that they sounded musical when they counted, was something they hadn’t expected.
Have you ever had a negative response to one of your films from someone you collaborated with, where they saw your film and wondered, what is the point of this?
No. I really think that everyone I work with trusts me and feels like a part of the process. They play active roles. I don’t pay people to be in my films. It’s really about developing something together. Usually my films take a lot of work, because it’s not just a documentary where you’re capturing something—it’s working together.
Your next film, Teatro Amazonas (1999) is also playing at Berlin Critics’ Week. There’s a 10-minute film called Ten Minutes Older (1978) by Herz Frank that just shows kids watching a show, without revealing what they’re watching. Then Kiarostami had Shirin (2008), which is just closeups of women watching a film. I like the humor that’s inherent to an audience just watching another audience. What drew you to that film’s idea?
I thought of it as a literal response to Goshogaoka. The perspective of Teatro Amazonas was flipped—it was the camera on the stage of the opera house in Manaus, Brazil, looking at an audience for a single 30-minute take.
It’s interesting to look back on how Teatro has been shown over the years. When it was selected for the Berlin Film Festival, there was a lot of disagreement among the programmers because I wanted it to be shown as a feature and not in a program even though it was only 40 minutes long. Ulrich Gregor insisted that it be shown alone because it’s really an event. The reactions at the end were very divided, especially between art people, music people, and film people. They were fighting and arguing in the audience during the Q&A. I didn’t really get that many words in. People were angry. When I showed it in Vienna, some guy stayed and asked for his money back. He said it was the worst film he’d ever seen. “Why did you make this, why did you have ten minutes of silent credits, did you expect people to watch that?” Funnily enough, he stayed through the Q&A and then watched the next screening because he had heard me speak about it. I think, early on, my films were tougher for an audience. People now are more accustomed to looking at the durational films. The film-festival world has changed a lot since then, too. It’s much more fluid now.
Did you like the fact that the audience was divided?
I mean, I was shocked. I was used to an art audience. It was great.
You mentioned music people. I think sound is a super interesting facet of your films. When I first watched Goshogaoka, I was wondering why there was this electronic drone in the beginning.
Michael Webster composed that. Musical composition has always been important to me, and I’ve continued to work with people like him and Becky Allen, who is a longtime collaborator, to shape these soundtracks.
I feel like it really sets the tone, priming you to be ready for the film. Sound in film can really animate and dictate the way we approach it. And having the sound bookend the film, to hear it at the end reminds us that what we just saw is a whole spectacle. How did that get decided? What was your intention with that?
The beginning is that tone, and it peaks, and then it goes down, and then the girls run through. I did think of it as setting the stage. It’s almost like those broadcast tones with the color bars at the beginning of a video. I liked that a lot of people thought the tone was inside the space. It’s not—it’s an electronic composition. Teatro starts with a 60-person choir, which also sets the tone, and over the course of the film, it reduces to a single voice.
After I rewatched the film I noticed the list of thank yous, and you thank the Wacoal Art Center, which I know about because they released experimental music in the ’80s and ’90s. I was just so surprised at this connection.
They are great! Arcus, who I did the residency with, had their offices there. I actually made a diptych of it showing women sitting in the window, taken from across the street. There were so many people who opened their doors for me to do research during that time. There was Image Forum who had the most comprehensive library of experimental film, and there was Comme des Garçons too (laughter).
I was wondering about that too.
That was for researching the costumes and sourcing fabric. I could have used any fabrics of theirs that I wanted, but in the end I went with something subtle and everyday. Having so many options was so seductive though! I love Comme and learned a lot there. Most interesting was watching every fashion show they ever did. The girls running straight to the camera in section two reflects that. Also the sound of fabric in sections 5 and 6 was inspired by Comme fabrics.
Wow, I hadn’t even thought about that. Do you still keep up with fashion?
Not really.
You made NŌ (2003) after Teatro Amazonas. That’s the first of your films where this idea of everyday actions and movements—
Like Goshogaoka.
But it’s even more. It seems to say that one’s everyday life is art. That’s the film where everything really came together for me. What is it like depicting that? I feel like some people would almost see it as insulting, saying things like, “This is labor, why are you treating it as art?” As opposed to just seeing the beauty in everyday movements. Have you ever had these sort of internal dialogues?
Well, labor’s been depicted in art for centuries.
That’s true. I guess I’m thinking of it in the context of filming labor.
For me, that film was really about painting. The earth in it is a canvas that’s brown at the beginning, and by the end, it is coated with color—which in this case was hay. I forget what you said exactly but I thought it was really good. “The beauty in the everyday.” I think a lot of my work is like that, pointing that out to people who don’t see what they do as remarkable. Labor is consistent throughout my work. But NŌ—the piles of hay, the mathematics behind it, its costuming, the choreography—really embodies that. Besides the labor in front of the camera, there is also the labor behind the camera and off-camera.
From this point on, your films really take on a painterly quality.
Thank you.
I’m curious, are you looking at paintings and trying to recreate them? Or do you just film, and then it happens to remind you of a painting?
(laughs). Everything is so researched, visually through history. And I read a lot about the subjects or theory around a topic that I’m working with. Most of the time, I’ll show my subjects my binders of visual research. I never show my art to them, I just show how I’m thinking about our film using images I have gathered. And then through that, I learn from them. I’m always asking questions.
Is there a specific reason you don’t show your own work?
I don’t think who I am and what I’ve done is important or relevant in these situations. I think [the people] are important and what they do is important. That’s why I’m working with them. It’s more relevant for me to say, “This is why I want to work with you and am thinking about what you do,” or “This is how I’m seeing clam digging,” or “These are the paintings and historical labor images that I’m looking at.”
Do you mind giving a specific example of the historical labor images you looked at, or how that informed one of the films you made?
(takes catalog off shelves). This is Lunch Break II, which is part of a trilogy of publications that I made to accompany the Lunch Break project. It’s almost entirely the research that I showed to the people I worked with on the film. There are [Works Progress Administration] images from the ’40s of workers from the shipyard going to lunch, and they’re running because they only had 30 minutes. So that’s something I shared with them. Or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895). The workers in Maine a lot of times would gather and play cards or read newspapers, so I have things like George de la Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (early 1630s) or a trompe l’oeil still-life by D’Avila (flips through book). These are some of the factories I did research in. This is Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant FOOD, and then there are paintings depicting labor, like Bruegel’s The Harvesters (1565). So they related to all of this, and they would bring in things they thought related too.
I love that you even made newspapers. I just had breakfast with a friend and I was telling them about Lunch Break (2008) and how you actually made the newspaper [Lunch Break Times].
It’s one of my favorite publications.
In doing this, you position the people you’re working with in this lineage. You realize that your life is not an isolated thing, and that you’re a part of this history. I’m curious what it was like to be involved in a project like making a newspaper.
The newspaper was delivered all throughout Maine and to all the factories we filmed at throughout the state: at the last sardine factory in America, at a chicken factory, at a lumber yard, a shoe factory. Once I gained access to Bath Iron Works, I only used footage from there. It was very important to give back to everyone I worked with, even those who weren’t in the film. Their workplaces are represented, and even if the camera doesn’t see them, they’re represented too. Many of them wrote articles: their spouses wrote, artists wrote, art historians like Lucy Lippard and Katy Siegel wrote, Yoko Ono contributed a painting, James [Benning] made a drawing… it was amazing. The papers were also part of the shows and free to the public. It was also the end of analog and newspapers were disappearing, so Lunch Break Times memorialized that.
I think about that a lot because people are just on their phones now.
You can’t be on your phone at Bath Iron Works because they’re building warships. You can’t have cell phones and you can’t take photographs—they rely on print. I loved seeing everyone read the paper on their lunch break, and they were informed because of that. I wonder what it is like today. So many local papers are no longer around.
In Lunch Break, you use that tracking shot and it evokes so many different emotions. How much of this was planned beforehand? Are there other films that were informing your approach, or were you just trying things out? And I also wanted to ask about Exit (2008). I love that you were inspired by the Lumière brothers.
Film is too expensive to try stuff out. I never just shoot. I always plan and know my frame and rehearse with the people in front of and behind the camera. I had to film Lunch Break during their actual lunch break and everything had to be timed perfectly. The workers knew when we were filming, and they knew what they wanted to do and how they wanted to represent themselves. What you see is a manual tracking shot, so that’s something that also needed to be planned.
With Exit, it was really just about me framing the scene and sticking to the same frame every day of the week for one workweek. But with that film too, the workers have the same kind of awareness and are performing. They knew the Lumière film and were proud that they were now part of this legacy. For me, the film is all about the way the architecture informs their life and routine. As they move, you can see the wear and tear on their bodies. There’s a lot of injury. There’s history within it all. You see their lunchboxes, how they carry them, and how that informs the way they move.
The Lunch Box Portraits (2008) that I made as part of that focus on the individual. They represent all of the trades in the union and they’re all titled with the name of the worker and what they do. They’re still lifes, but they’re also portraits. For example, this is Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator (points at a page from the Lunch Break I catalog). His lunch isn’t in the triptych but his routine is. He reads the newspaper, does a crossword puzzle, smokes a cigarette and takes his medicine. 30 years of ships that he’s built are represented in stickers on the lunchbox that he’s been carrying all those years. Union stickers. The union fought for me to have access to this high-security shipyard, and I wanted them to have a strong presence in the work.
You said earlier that you work with architects. Obviously, architecture informs the way we move around. What sort of things do you feel like you’ve gained insight into from having worked with these people?
They’re amazing—Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena. The firm is Escher GuneWardena from Los Angeles. When we were working on the installation for Lunch Break, we did so wanting to reference the structure of the film itself. The tracking shot is down what is essentially the backbone of the shipyard. For the installation, we ultimately came up with a 65-foot tunnel open at the entrance with the film at the end of it. The viewer has to move down the volume, just like the camera does, before they can sit and watch. For Double Tide, we designed two volumes, one for the sunrise shot and one for the sunset one, so that you can really see how much the landscape changes over the course of a day. They’re open, so if you are sitting in one, and you turn back, you can see the other. I’m always thinking about how films can work both in the cinema and in the gallery.
I think it’s very uncommon for someone to sit down and watch an entire film in a gallery setting, but the positive is that you can think more about space and how they’re interacting with that.
Yes, that is true. Like with Pine Flat (2005). When I installed it, I placed the work in two identical rooms. Each day, only one ten-minute shot from the film was shown in each room. One from the first half of the film and one from the second half. The shots would change every day, and there was a stack of ten-minute film cans next to the projectors hinting at that. You couldn’t see the film’s full two hours unless you went to the cinema to see it or if you came back to the gallery every day.
Are you usually thinking of how the film would work in a theater setting first?
Both at the same time.
Can you give me an example of one where you felt it was a struggle to sort of accommodate for both settings?
I originally made Teatro Amazonas and Goshogaoka only for the cinema because they’re so much about the proscenium and about an audience sitting together. That needed to be reflected in how people experienced them. EVENTIDE, for example, can be shown in either, but since it was shot at night, it requires a dark, black space for the projection to really work. In the end, I think the installation of EVENTIDE works in such a dark space because of how the image informs its architecture. The screen volume sits on the floor. You have no choice but to view it in relation to your own body. I usually hate the black box though. I’ve been fighting against it for 25 years.
Why do you hate it?
I just don’t feel that it’s about the body or how you move through space. It’s important to me that there’s a physical relationship to the work that’s being shown, which I don’t think you get unless you can see the space around you.
I liked your publication with James Benning, Over Time (2022).
Thank you.
Something I really liked about it, which is characteristic of both of your films, is that you’re never really holding the audience’s hands. They have to be patient. In the publication, you have excerpts from your filmographies, and then you have texts sometimes informing the images. It’s sort of like an exhibition in book form. How did you approach making that specific publication? You and James have worked together over the years, how did that come to fruition?
It wouldn’t have come to fruition if it wasn’t for Martin Beck, who edited and designed the book. We knew we didn’t want any text or interviews. With Martin, we identified some of the themes that are important to both me and James and that appear in both of our work. Obvious ones like labor, landscape, and class came up, as did less obvious ones like tenderness and friendship. We then both wrote something very short about each of the subjects. The images came next. As you say, the book does require patience.
Do you mind describing your affinity for James as a person and his work? I’m curious how you feel you have informed each other through dialogues you’ve had.
We’ve been friends for over 20 years now. We like a lot of the same things, we both are very curious people, and we look to each other for feedback. He’s an amazing person and a very good friend.
There’s one line that I thought was very sweet, in the context of you and James doing this together. It says: “Friends give meaning and make solitude possible.” Do you mind speaking to that?
Who do you think wrote that?
I don’t know.
Well see, that’s the great part about the book (laughter). When I read it, I think it’s so obvious who wrote what. James said that one, which makes perfect sense to me. He likes being with people, but he also really likes being alone. And now I’m moving his way. I’m more solitary and less social these days.
But I’m a pretty social person in general. I’ve recently been spending time on Fogo Island, a small place off the coast of Newfoundland, and have started getting to know the kids there and making new work with them.
Is there anything you’re comfortable disclosing about the new film [WINDWARD (2025)]?
In the ’60s and ’70s there were these films called the process films, by a Canadian documentary filmmaker [Colin Low].
Right, I learned about these last year.
There’s this one section about the children of Fogo, which is a key part of my research. The children on the island didn’t know about the film, so we watched it together. They’re showing me places that are important to them, much like in Pine Flat where the kids and I discovered places together, and the film is growing from there.
What sort of things do you appreciate about working with children that you don’t get when you’re working with adults in your other films?
Time is different for children. They are in the moment. Less guarded. More open.
I love the idea of their sense of time being different. I feel like as an adult now, I’m always thinking about what I have to do, the obligations I have…
After I made Pine Flat, I made Lunch Break. The reason I made it was because I started to think about how the kids in this film have free time. As an adult, what is free time? It’s a 30-minute lunch break.
Do you feel like your films are often made in this way? As a response to what came prior?
I’d say there are some, like how Goshogaoka, Teatro and others made me want to make films in the US and look at my own culture. Pine Flat, Lunch Break, Exit, Double Tide build on one another. But then I got commissions that took me elsewhere, and I ended up making installation work with dancers in their 70s, which is something different entirely. That came after I had made a film with kids, Podwórka (2009), in Poland, which was part of three films all made there over ten years. EVENTIDE was the first time I showed people in the distance as part of a landscape, rather than putting them in the foreground. This new film will have that same approach. So the work in general isn’t necessarily made in response to what came before it, but since it’s all part of my practice, there are always some things in common.
In another one of your Polish films, Rudzienko (2016), the scrolling text feels so slow. Usually, with scrolling text you’re—
You’re stressed, trying to read it all.
Right. I think about the scrolling of film credits and how they’re too fast to really be respected by the audience.
My credits always inform the film. In Teatro Amazonas, for example, the credits are crucial to understanding the work.
How do you approach making your credits, and ensuring that it’s understood that your projects involve a whole team of people?
We were talking about Goshogaoka earlier. If you sit through the credits, you realize it’s costumed and it’s choreographed. That’s all important to reading the work. For Teatro Amazonas, there are ten minutes of credits that list the neighborhoods of Manaus that everyone in the audience lived in. You see that I worked with a statistician, and that each neighborhood has representation in the audience. The credits also let you know that there was a composer and a live 60-person choir. In Rudzienko’s credits, you see there are all these workshops listed: critical thinking, theater, mindfulness. You realize that things aren’t just there, they don’t come out of nowhere, and that there’s more to the film than just what you see depicted on screen.
I couldn’t make the kind of work I do without everyone you see in the credits, and that goes beyond just the people who handle the technical or practical aspects of the filmmaking process. Whether it’s a friendship, or sharing my research with someone, or doing workshops—everyone is important.
How did you come up with the scrolling text in Rudzienko?
That was tough. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t look, listen, and read at the same time. My films are so much about spending time with an image and looking at all the details in the frame, really inspecting it. The minute you put subtitles in that frame, it’s a different act. You’re not seeing and hearing anymore. By having the image and the scrolling text presented separately, you’re able to take in the sound of the landscape, the girls’ voices, the Polish language, the intonation. Then once the image is gone, you’re left to really read and understand what they’re saying. There’s no sound accompanying the text, so you’re just interpreting what’s written.
There’s usually such a lack of creativity with how subtitles are presented.
I tried everything. The scrolling text was my first idea, and for months and months I tried all these other things. In the end I went back to the first idea, which happened to be the right idea. I’ve worked with Conny Purtill for many years on my titles and credits, and we also worked on this scrolling text together. It was important for us to not only use text in a way that worked well with the image, but to make it clear that there’s a dialog going on.
It’s presented like a poem because of the indentation.
Yes, and the film begins with a poem. You first hear it, spoken against ambient landscape sounds, and then you read it. The poem is amazing.
Yeah and it all really makes sense. The appeal of poetry to me is that you’re forced to focus on the impact of every single syllable. And because your film is presented in this way, the audience is much more thoughtful about what’s being said. If it was just subtitles, you’d be frantically trying to make sense of everything. This is the exact opposite of what I love about James Benning’s American Dreams (Lost and Found) (1984). I feel like I’m having a migraine trying to keep track of everything. I’m stressed out, but in a good way, and yours is the exact opposite.
That’s a good double feature (laughter).
I’ll ask you the question that I always ask everyone at the end of my interviews. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
That I’m still curious, and that I trust people. I find people interesting and know that I have something to learn from them.
Do you feel like there’s a reason why?
I don’t know why. It’s especially true with kids. The understanding of each other is almost immediate. I never realized that was a special quality that I had until I made Podwórka. I didn’t share a language with the children I was working with, but we still managed to understand each other perfectly. There’s a mutual trust.
Was there a specific moment when you realized that you have this quality?
Yeah. The producer for Podwórka went around to the courtyards with me to meet the parents, explaining what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to work with their kids and film. They were translating what I was saying to the parents, and the kids who I had met while scouting locations were correcting the producer. I just thought, wow, they understand me.
You’ve mentioned to me before that there came a point where you didn’t think you would be able to work with people again. What was it about the children at Fogo Island that convinced you to do so again?
Covid stopped us all in our tracks, and we were all sitting with the solitude that we were talking about earlier. I found myself in the studio making paintings with an assistant, and it was such a different experience compared to how I usually work. I wasn’t with lots of people and I wasn’t traveling. It was a different rhythm, and a different way of working out a process, going back every day until I figured it out.
Coming out of Covid’s peak in 2022, I was invited to Fogo Island by Fogo Island Arts for a residency. When I was there I kept working like I had in the studio, without involving people. It was nice. It’s a pretty small place, so it didn’t take long for me to meet the children there. It happened organically, and they drew me back in to wanting to work with people. There was just such joy. By the end of that summer I had started filming with them, and returned for three more summers to complete the work.
You’ve talked about the importance of building relationships with people when making films, as well as how children have a different sense of time. Do you have any specific memories that stand out about having made WINDWARD with these kids? What was it like to be with them? How did they differ from those you’ve worked with in the past?
I noticed that they had a much different relationship to their environment than most people I know and have worked with. They were much more attuned to the land, the sea, the weather. During the summer, there aren’t any structured activities for them. They’re usually outside playing, and they only go home for meals. It made me think about Janusz Korczak’s declaration of children’s rights, the right to respect, the right to die, the right to be who they want to be… he meant that kids have the right to take chances and to fail so that they could find their limits. He wanted them to not be shielded from situations that might be challenging. The children I worked with on Fogo live that. They take these risks because they have a feel for the land that you don’t have in other places.
WINDWARD doesn’t foreground people, as you mentioned earlier, and I’m curious how that shifts the way you think about the frame and the activity within it. Were there things you learned from making EVENTIDE that informed how you approached making WINDWARD? I especially love that second shot, as it looks like we’re looking at a miniature because of how small the island is.
I know what you mean, it’s like an island within an island. That scene especially reminds me of a Bruegel painting, where you have all of these different figures in the distance, all contained within the same landscape. EVENTIDE was the first film I made where the figures were small rather than up close, and I think WINDWARD takes that even further. They aren’t just small, but they’re enveloped by their surroundings. The film becomes about vastness and the power of the elements, not only because of the setting itself, but also the choreography and timing.
Is there anything about the film that you think is important to mention, that you would like for people to know?
I mentioned it before, but the complexity of the landscape on Fogo, the geology, the natural forces are so important to the film. I hope you can see and feel when watching it how ever-present the wind is there. I’ve never been somewhere where the wind was such a huge part of everyone’s life. It determines everything, the way they interact, the way they play, what they do for work. So when I talk about them being enveloped by their landscape, I mean it quite literally.
Sharon Lockhart’s WINDWARD plays as part of NYFF this weekend. Dates and information can be found here. An installation of WINDWARD is also on display at the Fogo Island Gallery through October. More information can be found here. The exhibition will travel to the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and will be presented there from October 22nd to January 7th, 2026.
Thank you for reading the 53rd issue of Film Show. Get enveloped.
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