In the spirit of uploading all of our past projects to Vimeo, Circle Haiku is a film that I directed back in 2009. For this film, I teamed up with Moe Clark, spoken-word poet extraordinaire and songstress. We brought our distinctive passions together – me for the moving image and Moe for the healing sounds of music – in an attempt to create a meditative look at… well everything.

I guess the goal was a little lofty, but we really wanted to explore events that came in cyclical patterns. I cannot remember which theme initiated our thought process but they eventually all fed into each other: the cyclical pattern that can be found in a day (morning, afternoon, evening, and night), in a year (spring, summer, fall, and winter), and in life (birth, youth, old age, and death). What became interesting to us was how these familiar events all had what seemed to be the end leading into the beginning. Our process became one of meditation.

We decided to present our explorations of these patterns in the form of a four-part Haiku video poem. Haiku poetry, a style of Japanese poetry, is a simple way of conveying an infinite amount of information. In its English form, the poem will be set out in 3 lines that have a total of 17 syllables. There are many other characteristics to Haiku poetry, but the one that we gravitated to is the following: Haiku poetry acts as a launching pad for further meditation. With this as inspiration, we created a moving poem, composed of experimental syllables of video and sound that we hoped would trigger vivid emotions in the viewer.

What was truly amazing about the creation of this film was that we received very important support from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Our film was created as part of the Making Music 3 initiative and provided the opportunity of mentorships with veteran filmmakers, film and video editors, technicians of all capacities, as well as the support of two beautiful ladies, producer Kat Baulu and associate producer Melisa Ferero. The film was screened for the first time at Pop Montreal in October of 2009.

Through this film, Moe and I wanted to express vibrating emotions that are present throughout life: existence, experience, nostalgia, and melancholy. We attempted to transform sensations common to all human beings into an audio-visual line of thought. In the same way that Haiku invokes emotion, our film invokes the personal and universal emotions that stir in our hearts.

I would love to hear any feedback and especially personal experiences of watching this film that you might want to share.