Sharon Lockhart adds 12 more static master shots to her filmography with Windward, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t finding new ideas for how to craft them. Shot on Canada’s Fogo Island, Lockhart’s latest project once again finds her examining a local community of children at play in their particular locale, but one can’t be entirely sure of the ages. This is the most landscape-centric film Lockhart has ever made, and even a full-grown adult would probably look like an ant in these compositions. The rocky cliffs and beaches look terribly foreboding, the Atlantic Ocean just keeps pounding away at the shore, and of course the fields of bright green grass, dotted by the occasional tree or flower patch, are constantly being buffeted by the wind. That old Griffith line about modern movies lacking the wind in the trees certainly doesn’t apply here.
Lockhart’s use of static master shots may be building upon the tradition of Andy Warhol, Larry Gottheim, and particularly her mentor/sometimes-collaborator James Benning (who’s thanked in the credits), but her use of people, particularly children, in environments tends to set them apart from Benning. Her last film, EVENTIDE, took a single shot of people combing a beach during sundown, and turned it into the kind of choreography of bodies and lighting that looks improvised while clearly not being so if you think about how it was captured. The title Windward might be a small hint of a pun in this case: a documentary about the wind colliding into the makeshift wards Lockhart has gathered to perform their daily routines.
Windward’s fourth shot is probably the one that will be easiest to appreciate as a study in the tensions of how Lockhart makes docufiction without calling attention to the fiction. It’s a simple setup of someone flying a kite who was clearly positioned to form a deliberate composition, where the kite and its shadow on the cliffs dance in the wind in a way that you couldn’t predict even if you were there. Other shots use a single building in a more rural area as a focal point, with at least one case of the wind making even a building seem like it can move. Whenever the kids are playing by the water, the composition never stops changing: the ocean is rarely ever still, the kids tend to either bob around or avoid getting hit by waves, and one girl feeds a flock of gulls who were clearly happy to perform for a free meal.
Windward might not be the most specifically drawn Lockhart work in some respects, although her embrace of a more mysterious approach is both deliberate and suggests a striking variation in her typical palette. This is a landscape film before it’s a community film, and her approach usually skews toward the reverse. Whatever action is being done by the human figures in several shots is kept a bit mysterious by emphasizing how said actions are fundamentally a bit irrelevant when you’re on such a remote rock in the sea. The wind will wear down these kids much more quickly than the Fogo landscapes, but embracing the small visual impacts they can have simply by moving about is Lockhart’s ultimate act of generosity.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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