SHEMIAH

digital video / 17 minutes 54 seconds/ 2006

DIRECTED + CAMERA + EDITED: Elizabeth Paige Smith

LOCATION: Grand Cayman Islands, B.W.I

In this film, Smith casts a 13 year old local boy as her subject. We follow Shemiah through a series of environments revealing the beauty in the slow life along with a dream-like state along an historical path once used by early ancestors to cross the island, capturing intimate observations of the vulnerability of time and place. After sneaking into the island's dump, a secretive landfill made up of cars in place of sensitive mangrove, Smith reveals a part of the world that’s typically hidden away from cameras, concealing the devastation taking place so carelessly behind our backs. Shemiah's walkabout is a journey of inspiration, equilibrium and defense. Smith’s juxtaposition of environments illustrates a critical moment in time, like a hypnotic exposé of life where slow cultural shifts abandon what is truly beautiful and now lost to a world racing towards the unknown.

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