All Fall Down

All Fall Down is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth-century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question "What has been here before?" The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth-century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker's step daughter) across two hundred years. All Fall Down explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs, that express the complexity of time and the politics of land. The film is structured through Hoffman’s extraordinary landscapes of Southern Ontario which make the temporal fabric shimmer, bringing us a meditation on childhood, property, colonialism, ecology, and love.
by Philip Hoffman Canada 2009 93’

Additional information

Download additional information