Re-Discovering Rituals
Walking to a movie theater is a ritual I hadn’t participated in since before the pandemic, since before I lost all concept of rituals in my life. I had become so used to being sedentary and alone, rather than moving, going places, and doing things that required me to engage my body and my senses. Now, for the first time in two years I was enjoying walking outside in the gentle rain, heading towards a room where I’d be among hundreds of other bodies, feeling like I was part of a community again. As we all meandered our way into the Roxie with our popcorn and drinks in hand, there was a sense of eagerness and joy in the atmosphere that I hadn’t witnessed in a long time. We settled in and the lights dimmed.
SFUFF’s week long film festival, Rituals of the City, premiered with the program Navigating Rituals. Executive Director Fay Darmawi prefaced the films with opening remarks about the history of the festival and the goals it set forth for the coming year. Curator Susannah Smith followed by introducing the evening’s theme of elevating our everyday rituals.
We started the night with Ghost Bikes (2017), which follows a New York-based cyclist named Mirza Molberg, who partakes in a ritual of erecting bicycle monuments for victims of fatal motor-vehicle accidents. Having been a member of the worldwide Ghost Bike Project since 2011, Molberg is familiar with every step of the memorialization process — from painting the bicycles white, carrying them over to the crash sites where they are chained up and decorated with flowers, to writing personalized plaques for each victim. Director Ethan Brooks focuses on Molberg’s remembrance of his late girlfriend, Lauren Davis, who died a year before the making of the film. Molberg created her memorial himself.
Brooks’ short film is clever in its use of motion, allowing the audience to journey alongside Molberg as he traverses the city on his bike and participate in his ritual with him. In the film’s final moments, we watch somberly as Molberg rides right down the middle of a dimly-lit road, confident and unwavering despite the heavy New York traffic surrounding him. Watching him, we are unable to do anything more than hold our breath in trepidation, waiting.
After New York, we journeyed across the globe to Iran to watch four families prepare to emigrate to Canada. The Face of a City (2021), directed by Farhad Pakdel, focuses on the significance of place in creating and maintaining rituals. In the days leading up to their departure, each family ponders their definition of place — how it goes beyond being something tangible and physically accessible to something that builds communities, creates memories, and carries emotional weight. They talk about familiar places around Tehran and ruminate on why they’re choosing to leave those certainties behind, and in doing so, sacrificing their sense of belonging.
As we see each family move from hope to apprehension before finally succumbing to imminent loss and grief, we see also how those very same place memories, once cherished, invoke the first stirrings of displacement. Without a sense of familiarity and intimacy, how can we have any rituals at all?
In the third film of the evening, we are brought along on an observational journey. East Side (2017), directed by Carlo Nasisse and Patrícia Nogueira, takes its audience on a short tour through East Austin, stopping at different people along the way as their lives are rapidly transformed by the influence of Big Tech. We are drawn into the minutiae of everyday peoples’ lives, and given an opportunity to exist alongside them. We watch them and listen to them, while also being able to see and hear the ambient background that surrounds them.
Through their experiences, we observe the slow process of gentrification and its impact on everyday rituals. When asked about the inspiration behind his film during the panel, Nasisse talks about how he began “feeling like spaces were getting homogenous. The variety [and] the heterogeneity of the experience of walking down the street was decreasing.”
Rituals are lost and then are regained, but some rituals always stay the same. In Passersby (2021), co-directed by Sarah Garrahan and Sue Ding, we witness the lives of six ordinary strangers in Los Angeles. We move alongside them one by one as they navigate their daily lives, and watch how their paths intersect and then diverge. Not only is the film structured around the characters’ rituals, but it also balances those rituals with serendipity and chance.
“How do we use ritual to make meaning while making room for serendipitous interaction?” posed Ding during the panel.
The film teaches us to look beyond the foreground and search for the many stories taking place in the spaces around us. From one character to the next we hop along, catching neither the beginning nor the end of any one journey, but witnessing instead the spaces where they overlap. In observing their routines and their little joys, we are able to experience the vibrancy that exists within the mundane and appreciate the everyday rituals of life; breathing, walking, talking. Singing and dancing. Creating. Being.
In the final portion of the evening, moderator Ron Sundstrom opened the floor up for questions and encouraged everyone to share their own rituals with the rest of the audience. The filmmakers in attendance, Carlos, Sue, and Sarah, discussed the ways they think about ritual in their filmmaking, from the process of shooting, gaining trust with participants, to discussing why they chose to make films about the everyday moments of these people’s lives. The audience chimed in with all kinds of things, ranging from sharing special moments with their cats to taking walks around their neighborhoods. Sundstrom’s suggestion allowed us all to pause and actually think about the people sitting next to us, who we share our cities with, the variety of rituals we all have and which ones we may share with a complete stranger. Left to ponder these questions, the audience began to filter out of the theater. Many headed towards the after-party a few doors down at Arepas. In the crowded restaurant over drinks and good food, we had the unique opportunity to continue the conversation.
Over dinner, I got a chance to talk with some of the stars and creators of the films, as well as the others who got to witness their art alongside me. We progressed from shy introductions and generic post-pandemic remarks to sharing newfound revelations, loudly hyping each other up across the table and celebrating the beginning of new adventures. We observed how the pandemic transformed us into people who embraced risk head-on after spending so much time hiding away from them. Most importantly, we noticed how it felt to once again be in community and appreciate the sacredness of sharing art, food, and conversation.
But now, being around creatives in the flesh, it became clear that the only way we could ever move forward into an equitable future is through intentional gathering via public events and fests such as these. Theaters are ideal settings for this form of gathering. The opportunity to witness the physical, tangible presence of art in ones’ city is a transformative ritual like no other. Having conversations with real people (that you’d never meet at home, where we are caught in the same digital echo-chambers and manipulated by The Algorithm™) holds the potential to unlock groundbreaking new ideas about creative placemaking, and about the many rituals that can transform a community.
I walked home that night in the still-pouring rain feeling reinvigorated, reveling in the feeling that actually, I too deserve to exist here. In the wake of this newfound sense of belonging, I made a promise to myself to continue to show up, demand space, and drive wedges in between closing doors. To allow myself to be swept in through the gap, pushed forward by the comforting weight of the ones who were always right behind me.
