NZIFF Q&A - Sam Hamilton

NZIFF Q&A - Sam Hamilton

My film is Apple Pie and it's about:

Apple Pie is a new experimental feature-length art film shot on super 16mm celluloid film over 3 years in Aotearoa NZ, Samoa and USA featuring Samoan dance artist Ioane Papali’i and twenty other performers, artists and friends.
A constellation of ten meditative, poetic and tenderly political cinematic evocations that chart their way through a series of relational correlations to objects of our solar system. 
Drawing together an ecology of influences, Apple Pie weaves its way through a audio visual tapestry of relationalist meditations, political mythologies, photonic sculptures, atomic choreographies and ceremonial homages to the world, and what it means to be a part of it, to engage with it, to listen to it, to embody it and be embodied by it. 

The reason I made this film is:
It is the by-product of a process. Like taking a walk in a garden. It’s the shell of existential agency.

What's the one moment that stands out in your film and why?
Mmm. I feel like this film consists of nothing but moments that have been teased out of their isolation to form slabs of light and sound. If you think of these elements as the architectural materials of a cinematic building, the only moment that matters is after you - as significant other of the film - have walked through its door, walked up to the window and stand there and just stare into space.

What was the hardest thing about completing your film?
Physically it would be spending a week sitting atop a mountain out in the Oregon high plain desert filming throughout the freezing nights and then being cooked alive during in the shadeless desert days while trying to catch some sleep. Punishing, but fun. 

What’s the most satisfying thing about your film?
Only the audience can know this.

What’s been the one piece of feedback from either peers or audiences that has struck you the most and why?

I have had a lot of people offer me very kind and loving feedback about the work, but I think the one that really means something to me is the feedback about the one rather long shot where "nothing" happens, and how painfully boring it is, until you break through something invisible, and suddenly it's purely ecstatic, then again it's boring, and then you break through yet another invisible boundary into pure ecstatic overwhelming sensorialism, even though nothing has actually happened. You have brought these things into being yourself. 

What’s next on the cards for you?
Dancing. Eating. Laughing.

Get details on Apple Pie here.