45/ The Lonely Age

2019
By Connie Zheng
Duration: 11:47 min.

How does this work investigate “hope?”
“The Lonely Age takes the problematic of hope as its central concern. Hope manifests in the form of rumors of magical seeds, which are catalysts that create new alliances, divide communities, and motivate debatably beneficial actions. I see the seeds as vehicles for dreaming and world-building, even as they are affected by the capitalistic ideologies of the present. By using improvisational, collaborative methods to create this work, I also treat my filmmaking process as a laboratory for generating real-life conditions for new modes of collective imagining.” —Connie Zheng

About the work:
“The Lonely Age is an experimental, pseudo-documentary film project about seeds and the hope that their existence can offer in an ecologically ravaged world. The story takes place in a dystopian near future that is not so different from the world in which we live today: a world in which mythology and the news feel interchangeable, bio-corporations have privatized all agricultural information, and the air and oceans have become toxic. People begin to hear rumors of magical seeds that have washed up on the shores of California. The seeds are rumored to have curative properties, but they are also said to be sentient and communicative. How do people desperate for salvation re-imagine and negotiate the terms of their survival, and what possibilities exist for us to engage in non-exploitative behavior amidst ecological crisis? Is it possible for us to imagine an escape out of our own conditioning? This work is intended as part of a longer, three-part film (currently in progress) rooted in explorations of the potentialities offered by collective fantasizing, the romance of the apocalyptic narrative, and whether or not our current environmental crisis can push us to imagine more equitable ways of living and relating to one another.” —Connie Zheng