The Illinois Parables

Director: Deborah Stratman

Film Details: 60 minutes, 2016, USA, color, 16 mm

Film Website | Tickets Available Soon!

Co-presented with the Film Study Center at Harvard University and the Balagan Film Series

World Premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, European Premiere at Berlinale, February 2016, Winner of the Stan Brakhage Award at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Director Deborah Stratman will attend in person for discussion.

About the Film:

An experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state is a convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how we’re shaped by conviction and ideology.

The film suggests links between technological and religious abstraction, placing them in conversation with governance. Locations are those where the boundaries between the rational and supernatural are tenuous. They are “thin places” where the distance between heaven and earth has collapsed, or more secularly, any place that bears a heavy past, where desire and displacement have lead us into or erased us from the land. What began as a consideration of religious freedom eventually led to sites where belief or invention triggered expulsion. The film utilizes reenactment, archival footage, observational shooting, inter-titles and voiceover to tell its stories and is an extension of previous works in which the director questioned foundational American tenants.

The Parables consider what might constitute a liturgical form. Not a sermon, but a form that questions what morality catalyzes, and what belief might teach us about nationhood. In our desire to explain the unknown, who or what do we end up blaming or endorsing?