"There is No Separation": A Limited Screening

One week only! Watch the transfixing documentary portrait of a woman who lives "without harming the world."

This week (February 20-27th, 2023) Juke readers have access to a limited screening of “There is No Separation,” a short documentary film by director Wes Kline, co-produced with writer Damon Falke.

From the film description:

There Is No Separation is a short documentary portrait of a woman who has tried to live without harming the world, while remaining present to its changes. Laura Jackson has spent over 40 years cultivating 10 acres of the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana. Her life has been one of kinship with place and the slow revelations of family history. We see Laura nurturing a landscape, speaking to environmental change, and ultimately, asking questions of our shared mortality. Her story is one of crafting a life, yet perhaps never knowing home.

There Is No Separation is directed, shot and edited by Wes Kline. Damon Falke served as interviewer, story editor & writer. The film is co-produced by Wes Kline & Damon Falke. It was shot on location near Hamilton, Montana in 2022.

You can watch the trailer here:

Damon Falke writes…

Laura and I met in the spring of 1992. We met on a whitewater trip. She was in her forties, and I was nineteen. She lived then and continues to live in a small cabin on property where she keeps a garden and a field. She paints with watercolors and acrylics and makes collages from scraps of old paper. We became friends after that first boating trip. Years went on. There have been letters and phone calls and visits and stories and recommended books and links to essays and poetry. She is perhaps the least sentimental person I know, and I doubt she believes in such a thing as an ordinary life. She would say we are all on a journey and who knows where we are going. In There Is No Separation we see part of a journey, or part of a journey within a journey within a journey. And if not ours, then maybe yours.

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Update: Our screening has ended! Thanks so much to all the Juke readers who watched “There is No Separation” this week. And thanks again to Wes Kline for making the film available to us. You can still check out the trailer above, and follow the film at https://noseparation.net/.

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Wes Kline is an artist and faculty at New College of Florida, having taught previously at New Mexico State University, the University of Florida, and at St. Lawrence University. He earned his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2005. His research and work looks at "minor" pivots in modernist narratives, focusing specifically on ecology, language and performance in proximity to architecture, philosophy and meta-modernism. He has shown his work nationally and internationally and teaches courses in photography and extended media, including video, installation and sound.

Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.