A Native botanist, grieving the death of a beloved aunt, travels alone to northern Mexico, where she is nourished by images of the last trip they took together traversing the Colorado River.

Director Bio:

Emilie Upczak is an independent filmmaker, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, and the Interim Faculty Director of the Brakhage Center for Media Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Emilie holds a BA in Comparative Religious Studies also from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a Rotterdam Producers Lab alumni and an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant recipient. 

Emilie spent ten years developing her practice while living in Trinidad and Tobago, where she also worked as the Creative Director for the trinidad+tobago film festival spearheading the Caribbean Film Database and Caribbean Film Mart. Emilie’s video installations have been exhibited at PG Contemporary in Houston, AIR Gallery in Brooklyn and the Festival International Signes de Nuit in France. Her short films have played at a number of Caribbean and African Diasporic Film Festivals as well as at Clermont Ferrand and MIPTV markets. Emilie’s debut narrative feature, set in Port of Spain, Moving Parts, is available through Indiepix on Amazon. 

Emilie recently completed the narrative short, Silt, a proof of concept for a narrative feature film, to be set on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, and she is working with the University of Colorado Archives on a new project surrounding the life and work of Ann Roy, an American poet, mystic and feminist activist.