PACED is an experimental hybrid “tone-poem” short that explores the different dimensions of pace (as speed, as measure, as rubric for containment) in the city through time lapse, montage, and split screens to investigate the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. In the process, urbanism has divorced residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty and impacts.

Shot primarily with a camera phone, PACED deliberately utilizes entirely prosaic and even “noisy” imagery in its critique of the massively popular and lauded “tone-poems” of Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke, with their reliance on the iconic, and exquisite vignettes of white bourgeois fetish. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure not unlike a musical score. In its construction of an arc through pure form, PACED mirrors its rubric of measure and containment, as well as brackets how the appetite and production of sentimental, rousing, or tidy conclusions in film are complicit in the distraction and disengagement from issues and self-reflection.

RUNNING TIME: 05:20 | COMPLETED: 02/13 | DIRECTOR: STEPHEN CHEN | DISTRIBUTOR: