Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

With the excuse of freedom, we lose so many things. — Silvio Barile

Simultaneously a critique of violence, a rumination upon our national psyche, and a ritualized celebration of colossal forces beyond our control, Deborah Stratman’s new experimental documentary explores the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny. O’er the Land is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst. The film serves as a meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence

A pair of glasses and their strange power as an historical artifact.

An experimental documentary about Oakridge, Tennessee, the once clandestine site constructed by the U.S. Government during WWII to enrich uranium for the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.