Pre-Occupied

From author Heid E. Erdrich —

“Pre-Occupied” is a rather recent and experimental form, the poem-film.  Originally a hyper-linked text written for the website 99 Poems for the 99%, poet Heid E. Erdrich created a visual landscape of associations and references that match the tremendous irony of how the word “occupy” can be meant. The film version of this poem is a collaborative collage that means to reveal the distracted human mind at a particular point in history.  Released in early 2013, the film inadvertently anticipated the Idle No More Movement. In 2016 we see the rise of indigenous eco-action at Scared Stone Camp through the No DAPL movement. Extraction industry threatens indigenous peoples world-wide, but in truth it threatens us all.

“Pre-Occupied”-Heid E. Erdrich, Producer and Co-Director; R. Vincent Moniz, Jr., Co-Director; Jonathan Thunder, Art Director and Animator.  Written by Heid E. Erdrich.

Heid E. Erdrich is a collaborative artist and the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Cell Traffic from University of Arizona Press. Her curatorial work includes over a dozen exhibits in Minnesota. Heid’s poem films have been selected for screening at festivals internationally including ImagineNative, Co-Kisser, Native Film Festival, Vision Maker, and at the Santa Fe Indian Market film festival, Class-X. Her collaborative poem videos have won a Judges Award, a Best of Fest, and a Best Experimental Short awards in 2014 and 2015. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She teaches the MFA Creative Writing program of Augsburg College.

http://heiderdrich.com

###

Special thanks to Rev. Carmen Retzlaff for connecting these great contributors to AllCreation.org.