Meirav Ong

The Ark | A short Film by Well of Wills Collective

ABOUT THE FILM

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Ark is a hybrid documentary short that weaves together experimental video diaries and lyrical performance to reflect on longing, loss, and the ways we cope with isolation. This collection of video diaries assembles works of professional and novice artists in response to Shared Process, a series of filmmaking prompts generated between April-June 2020. Through these intimate portraits and the filmmakers’ poetic engagement with the myth of The Great Flood, the film examines the magnitude of our collective grief and asks “On the other side of this, who will we become?”

ABOUT SHARED PROCESS

When the pandemic hit New York City in March 2020, Well of Wills Collective launched a free virtual filmmaking workshop for our community, which was suddenly splintered around the globe, sharing a single crisis in isolation. On Fridays, we hosted virtual conversations of the week’s themes which used Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theory of the five stages of grief as the scaffold to structure the workshop. In these early days of the pandemic, when many of us were still learning how to use zoom, Shared Process became a weekly anchor for us to share the feelings that moved us to create. Over the course of this 6-week experiment, 40 microfilms were submitted. 

The Ark assembles a selection of these films into a single artifact that makes space for collective grieving and commemoration. As artists who wish to positively impact the creative industries we work in by generating non-hierarchical, collective models of creative process, our challenge was to co-author a cohesive document of the times with a multiplicity of voices.