Begun in the long fall of 2011 when Occupy Toronto made new homes out of St. James Park. I gathered glimpses of human microphone meetings, demos and hang outs. Threaded through the meet ups are a succession of individual portraits that offer perspectives from a biologist, a poet, a nun, the angel of history, medieval witches and more.
The Occupy Movement asked many questions: about how economic life reframed the city, about mental health, gender and homelessness. Further questions arrived with the bodies who lived and met together in a shared space, where the voices of single speakers were repeated by others, carried across distances in a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
The film asks: is it possible to make a group picture out of individual portraits, especially when they are haunted by thoughts and ideas that come from the others? Each appears as the subject of ventriloquism, offering internal monologues collaged out of gender philosophers, novels and newspapers. How does the inner voice that each of us carries around permit other voices to speak through us (and is this part of a political project of solidarity?), while contributing to the project of singularity, helping to create an individual as unique as a blade of grass, or a stone on the side of the road.