"Florida's impoverished marshlands with their animal kingdom of tortoises, flamingoes, crocodiles and a fabled species of monkey are the setting for two parallel stories, which are subtly woven together across ages and narrative voices. Death is apparently the only permanent figure in Jessica Bardsley's fabulating and partly autobiographical Southern Gothic story, whose wild narrative threads emanate from a real historic and geographical reality, but continues as an imaginary febrile dream, where a mysterious 'Bird Woman' joins a photographer on an anthropological expedition into the damp depths of the marshlands. The whole thing starts on a veranda with the grandmother, who finds a box with old photographs with unknown faces, and leads up to an alarming realisation: 'It must be true that we invented anthropology to house our details. And details make not knowing feel more comfortable.' Bardsley illustrates the two threads of the story with respectively old black-and-white footage of life in the marshlands where a small worker family lives off collecting mussels, and more recent 16mm colour footage. The aim is not to have the two ages contrast each other, but to remind us where myths come from. " (CPH:DOX)
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