“I’m interested in the idea that Illinois was all Indian land less than 200 years ago,” says cinematographer Ines Sommer, who moved here from Germany in 1986 to study film at the School of the Art Institute. “Americans are aware of whose land they’re settled on, but it seems like a little bit of a blind spot. People talk more about slavery and other injustices, but then they have these warrior figures of Indians all over the city. I knew I wanted to bring out that history in some way.”
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She was shooting digital video for the CITY 2000 project when she started thinking about doing a narrative piece that explored land use and other urban issues. “I was looking at neighborhoods and construction areas and how the city was being divvied up,” she says. “I thought I’d make a 20- or 30-minute film about a character who drifts through and observes the city.”
Sommer, whose background is in experimental and documentary film, utilized such devices as crawling text and dream sequences to flesh out the story and back it up with statistics. The actors and crew were people she knew; all worked for free over the two long years of shooting. “My kid is in it and my friends’ kids are in it. But it’s not just budgetary,” she says. “I like the fact that I’m connected with these people.” There was no script, and the actors improvised dialogue around the scenes Sommer sketched for them. “When you have a tight script and everything is storyboarded out, it often closes off the creative process a little bit,” she says. “People think, ‘If I veer off the tiniest bit I will lose my movie.’ Mine is more like free jazz; I like to allow for chance things to happen.”
