North (2027) [Upcoming/Unreleased]

16mm, B&W, 3 min, Sound




Email hoganseidel at gmail dot com for screener or print rental.

I found a decaying print of Nanook of the North buried in the archive at Northwest Film Forum. Vinegar-soaked. Warped. Unstable. I let it keep rotting. Then I pushed it further: through photochemical abrasion, through touch, through light.

This film, north, is not about restoration. It is about confrontation. I turned the lens back on the original, flipping the ethnographer’s gaze onto itself. These frames have been fumbled through too many hands, canonized in textbooks, uncritically screened in classrooms. Flaherty’s legacy is one of observation masquerading as truth, of distance framed as authority, of violence rendered as romance.

I approach the material not to represent it, but to hold it. To sit with its damage. To mark it with heat, with light, with gesture. I am not re-presenting the image. I am pressing against its surface, smearing its claim to objectivity. I see myself not as a filmmaker, but as an image handler.

What do we do with the myths we inherit?
We unmake them.
We hold them until they blur.
We watch them burn.