AUDIO FROM SOJOURNER (2018):
"Do you know what you have done?
You have climbed to the heaven
and have taken hold of the clouds."
CAULEEN SMITH: What does a really radically generous
community and intentional world building look like?
My name is Cauleen Smith and I'm a filmmaker.
Sojourner is a film in which I visit
several different sites in the United States
where I believe acts of radical generosity and community
building occur.
We're generally cynical about ideas around utopia.
Like, oh, they never work.
It's not possible.
But there have been instances where people have managed
to build intentional communities that were really
successful.
I wanted to build a film that meditated
on this idea of what it means to build something
for others and to be generous.
I first spent a lot of time visiting various sites.
I took my 16-millimeter camera down to the Watts Towers
in Los Angeles and I filmed as a way of looking at it.
I stumbled over this photograph
when I was researching the Watts Towers taken
by this photographer, Billy Ray, for Time Life.
It's a beautiful photograph of these guys who
sort of languidly hanging out in the Watts Towers.
And one guy has a transistor radio
and I'm obsessed with radios
and it just seemed like a fashion issue.
And yet something about it seemed authentic.
I had this idea that it would be a fabulous image
to reenact, and then I thought, oh, I should really
reenact it with women.
But in speculating and projecting about what the future
could look like,
it made sense to restage that photograph
at the outdoor museum in Joshua Tree inside of one
of Noah Purifoy's sculptures.
And then I combined that with voices of women reading
these texts from Alice Coltrane, who
was an amazing musician and then became spiritually
transcended.
Audio from Sojourner (2018):
"What is monumental and eternal to me
is to feel the Lord's play
and hear the Lord's laughter or talk."
CAULEEN SMITH: Rebecca Cox Jackson,
who was a Black woman.
And she started the first and only Shaker community that
was in a city center.
AUDIO FROM SOJOURNER (2018):
"I must be unmade and remade,
and thou must be made a new creature."
CAULEEN SMITH: And this other more contemporary text
written in 1977, the Combahee River Collective, which
was written by a group of Black women and academics
and queer women.
It was a manifesto declaring the ways in which they had
to join together, work together in order to take care of
and liberate themselves.
And they list all the different ways that Black women
are routinely marginalized and dismissed.
And that the only people who are going to save are us.
AUDIO FROM SOJOURNER (2018):
"Before looking at the recent development
of Black feminism,
we would like to affirm that we find
our origins and the historical reality
of Afro-American women's continuous life
and their struggle for survival and liberation."
CAULEEN SMITH: The desert shoot in Sojourner
was just so much fun.
I need 12 women to be in the desert
and to wake up before the sun comes up.
And to look fabulous.
The way it came together, it just seemed as if it was
wanting to happen.
Waking up with the sun, it does something to you.
It was like a really beautiful experience
and it had everything to do with the desert
and the magic that's just out there for you.
At the end of Sojourner, it's done
and all of these women are walking across the desert
and they settle into this pose, stare at the camera,
and then they just inhale.
And with the sun rising, and trying to connect all
of these different historical points.
For me, in that moment, they come together
to signify possibility.
It is possible to build a better world.
It's possible to be generous.
It's possible to build something that
is no longer good for yourself, but for others.
It's possible to leave something behind.
It's just possible to make a better world.
People do it all the time.
AUDIO FROM SOJOURNER (2018):
"At the even tide, be so big that sky will learn sky."