All Roads Lead to the Sea

All Roads Lead to the Sea is a one-hour video documentary about the city of Havana, Cuba. The project, combining cultural anthropology and experimental video, is what might be termed "experimental ethnography." It grows out of questions concerning how to represent urban landscapes, and explores the reciprocal relationships between people and space: how we mark and are marked by the places we move through, how space is transformed into meaningful place. The documentary creates a collaged portrait of the Cuban capital, constructed from the stories of a diverse group of long-term city residents.

The video takes as its model the uneven and spontaneous process by which we come to know a place; through an accumulation of the thick details of daily life as it is lived in a given place at a particular historical moment. The video presents a unique and intimate portrait of a real place, Havana , in which ordinary residents and “regular life” take center stage.

Approaching its subject from the side, All Roads Lead to the Sea works cumulatively upon viewers, offering slices of a whole that we never see in its entirety. The intimacy of the stories revealed by long-time city residents is in resonant contrast to the video’s visual style, which alternates between formally-framed observational footage and collaged segments that create points of view illustrative, yet literally impossible.

Sarah Teitler

Curriculum vitae (doc-file)