Homegrown: wade into murky waters is a celebration of Saskatchewan-made filmmaking and an invitation to slow down, look closer, and sit with what feels unresolved. In this interview for Currents, filmmaker and program curator Emma Zuck reflects on the origins of Homegrown, her approach to programming prairie short films, and why creating space for local filmmakers and film-lovers to gather on Treaty Six feels more important than ever. Touching on themes of memory, place, and the quiet labour of community-building, Zuck offers insight into a program that embraces curiosity over certainty. We invite you to read on, then join us in person for this free community screening and post-film panel discussion on Thursday, January 15 at 7 PM.
This interview was conducted by Kyle Zurevinski, Remai Modern’s Digital/Media Program Assistant.
KYLE ZUREVINSKI: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, Emma! I’m very excited about this program that you’ve put together. Could you please introduce yourself a little and let us know more about your own curatorial and filmmaking practice?
Emma Zuck: I am a filmmaker and writer, with a poet’s sensibilities. I want to watch and create things that don’t seek to answer, but instead pose new questions, perhaps a better question than you started with. I came into film programming in 2023, through a desire to share my thesis film with people at home and realizing that wouldn’t happen unless I screened it myself.
Emma Zuck with the Wade Into Murky Waters poster. Photo by Joe Zuck.
I did an open call for Saskatchewan filmmakers’ work to feature alongside it, and the sheer challenge in finding other films really underscored the necessity of something like Homegrown. I will always remember how thrilled and grateful folks were to see things made by locals. I went on to work for Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival with their Industry Programmer that same year. This opened my eyes to all the programming beyond screenings— panels, pitch contests, workshops— and I’d love to grow our capacity to include more arts facilitation and education in the future.
Filmmaking is my way to share secrets and listen in. I’m inspired by visceral image-making, blurring the lines of fantasy and reality, but also tender, brutal, subtlety— being a quiet witness to real life. Our attention is our biggest resource. What we focus on and what we leave out, are such intentional parts of filmmaking. I myself am full of desire, but I aspire to artistry that is comfortable in its own skin, certain and precise. It’s important to me to platform other racialized artists, queer artists, the company I longed for growing up here. To share space with those who care about and notice the world around them, and are eager to resist and invent.
What can attendees expect from this upcoming program, “Homegrown: wade into murky waters”?
Wade into murky waters is the title, but it’s also… a request… an invitation… to embrace something unfamiliar… look back at the distorted reflection… what might you find? I hope it excites the audience, invites introspection, and that they talk about all the movies on the drive home.
Could you elaborate or speak to the selection process? What was it like to seek out and ultimately select these FIVE prairie short films, and how did the final program come together?
It’s very hard to find filmmakers in this province! I feel like everyone is incognito, and cannot be bothered with the indulgent nature of self promotion… So first I had to do some detective work. Scour RAIS and U of R student lists, archived film festival programs, cold email a friend of a friend, etc. This year we were adamant that all five films would also be films shot on location in Saskatchewan, and that limited the selection even further. But I think it’s cool that Homegrown may be the first time some of the filmmakers have screened their work. People want indie filmmaking to thrive in theory, but actually finding and platforming that work is a much more rigorous, rough-around-the-edges, process. And I still have so much learning to do. Having your support Kyle this time around made a huge difference.
It’s always very interesting to me when filmmakers put together film programs. I find that they see something in the works that often arts administrators or curators may not have, and I think that the overarching theme of memory within this program feels very true to yourself. Could you speak to how these films are in conversation with one another, and the ways in which they highlight prairie filmmaking?
I remember reading that Saskatchewan has the most poets per capita (I don’t know if this is true), but it inspired a conversation crediting this fact to one’s constant access to the horizon— We can always see the sky in the prairies. When I lived in Toronto for six years, I was right downtown, and I rarely saw the sun set. There’s often a pastoral quality to prairie filmmaking, a vastness, an openness. Even when it’s not present in the literal setting, you often feel it in the fabric of the film. Our communities are much smaller, often more familiar, and it makes us sentimental people. We also all grew up quite bored I imagine (driving up and down 8th Street was a common pastime in my youth), so you learn to make things interesting, to be observant and imaginative. The selected films are quite different from one another, yet they all embrace a peculiarity, a tension, or a curiosity to know more.
In Kimchi it’s a quiet conversation connecting a family staple to a larger story of place, the mixed media approach brings up feelings of nostalgia and childlike wonder. In Klee it’s an otherworldly ruse that taunts and awakens the history we allow to lament and rot in prairie soil, Baird crushes the tension with a giant prosthetic organ. In Slamdunk the practical camera effects are almost dream-like, the way remembering feels, it’s introspective, spacious, and allows us to make our own meaning. In Fear & Trembling we are faced with collective memories and truth sustained by the community in the name of the church, our protagonist is brave enough to challenge that— how is memory used to protect, to shield? In sIgh the editing is fragmented and unreliable, yet tender and honest, like the inner dialogue that changes and circles the same memories as we age, we’re left staring out the window alongside the narrator, our minds might wander as well— where to?
Memory is a theme I return to often in my work as someone deeply unwilling to part with the past. I think as artists we all have a relationship to memory and how we choose to indulge, betray, escape, or reinvent those experiences, is equal parts fascinating and perhaps revealing!
Homegrown 2023. Photos by Patrick Miller.
Why is Homegrown important to you?
Homegrown is a celebration! It’s a love letter to the artists who reside here. I think coming from a smaller place with less resources, we are often defined by what we lack. But it’s also why everyone I meet is multidisciplinary, because we teach ourselves and we learn from each other. The communal roots of indie filmmaking, a true understanding that the practice takes many hands in unison, feels alive and well here. My hope is to nurture that love for the craft (and each other) through Homegrown.
Cover Image Credit – On set of Adagio, directed by Emma Zuck.
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