JESS PORTUONDO
JESS PORTUONDO
FILMMAKER
Sinking City
The psychics and the scientists told us it would happen: the temperatures would rise, the magic would fade, and the home we knew would slowly flood back into the sea…
This film is about loss and the confusion of a slow and painful grieving process. An eroding coast, an aging generation, a disappearing culture, and the question of how to proceed after understanding that the inevitable is arriving, like a storm approaching the shore. So, now what? During this transition, it’s essential to document the uncertainty of change.
A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship is Ariel Francisco’s second book of poems. In this book, Ariel “deals with climate change and the absurdities and difficulties of being a millennial Latinx in the Sunshine State.” In a post-hope Miami, Florida, nostalgia holds the heartstrings and punches the gut. Sinking City, the film, adapts A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship into a collage of narrative scenes with humanistic characters. The film showcases the diversity of experiences often overlooked in portraying the multicultural city and its relationship to a vanishing shore, generational loss, and the perplexing emotions surrounding a transitional period of change.
Sepia Desert
“Sepia desert” is here ✨ It’s an ode to the American West, childhood prayers, and the terrors that come at us in the late summer nights...
November
Travis Truax is a writer living in Bozeman, Montana. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2010. In the fall of 2011 he finished one semester of graduate school before he ran away, overwhelmed by his snowballing student loan debt. With that large and ballooning fear, a car, and loose feet, he spent several years working in some of the national parks out west, including Yellowstone, Zion and Olympic. His writing has appeared in various journals and magazines, such as Quarterly West, Hippocampus, High Desert Journal, Barnstorm, Gravel, Split Rock Review and Raleigh Review.
In Travis’s poem “November”, he begins to understand his new home, how the seasons move, all while longing for the places he left behind. Looking honestly at idea of forgiving and forgetting, he attempts to reconcile where he is with where he used to be.
This film adapts his poem into a visual metaphor, showcasing the duality of emotions as we travel through time.
High and Dry
Havre, Montana. It’s 4:30 a.m. and the sun starts to break over an endless field of wheat. Only five miles from Canada, this is the highline, and this is dryland farming. Anna Jones-Crabtree owns and operates Vilicus Farms, a first generation, organic dryland crop farm. With almost 8,000 acres of land, Anna committed herself to fostering agricultural land stewardship on a “scale that matters.” But what does this mean? And what does this look like?
High and Dry cinematically documents the daily life, science, and philosophy behind a woman who has dedicated her entire life and life’s savings to Vilicus Farms for the purposes of making a small impact on the fight towards a more sustainable world. Over twenty-six percent of the current property is habitat for wildlife and pollinators, and their non-chemical based approach to farming implements modern organic farming practices to achieve healthier soil. And it seems to be working, with a 3.2% increase in organic matter found in the soil each year. Yet every experiment, no matter how promising, takes a toll. This film seeks to understand the sacrifices and complexities behind the overly romanticized notion of the organic farm.
