Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) dir. Ana Vaz

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of Unschool, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions, and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz, questioning what cinema can be. Here the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song. The film is a song you can see, wrote one of the students in a collective constellation of phrases and drawings made during one of the workshops. The phrase is a perfect description of a film that explores a nascent ecology of the senses.