One Thousand Voices (HD Video)
One Thousand Voices is a film poem, a fractured elegy shaped by memory, dislocation, and a yearning for belonging.
Through Paris Whitehead’s layered and intimate spoken text, the protagonist moves through landscapes that offer both solace and sorrow. Nature becomes a charged terrain where absence echoes and memory takes root.
The spoken text finds its visual counterpart in Martin Sercombe’s intimate cinematography, which traces the South Island’s elemental geography: the limestone headlands of Te Hapu, the shadowed fern bush of Hokitika and tidal mud flats cloaked in mist. Each location becomes an emotional cartography, mapping internal states through the language of wind, water, rock, and light.
This three-way dialogue is completed by Paul McLaney’s immersive soundscape, composed from field recordings and live instrumentation. His score flows organically with the imagery and voice, blending breath, birdsong, and echoic tones into a sonic weave that holds the work’s emotional resonance in tension and release.
In essence, the film is a meditation on loss, ancestry and the fragile threads that bind memory to landscape. Quiet, surreal and unresolved, it speaks of the many voices that inhabit the natural world and the human need to follow them home.
One Thousand Voices (HD Video)
One Thousand Voices is a film poem, a fractured elegy shaped by memory, dislocation, and a yearning for belonging.
Through Paris Whitehead’s layered and intimate spoken text, the protagonist moves through landscapes that offer both solace and sorrow. Nature becomes a charged terrain where absence echoes and memory takes root.
The spoken text finds its visual counterpart in Martin Sercombe’s intimate cinematography, which traces the South Island’s elemental geography: the limestone headlands of Te Hapu, the shadowed fern bush of Hokitika and tidal mud flats cloaked in mist. Each location becomes an emotional cartography, mapping internal states through the language of wind, water, rock, and light.
This three-way dialogue is completed by Paul McLaney’s immersive soundscape, composed from field recordings and live instrumentation. His score flows organically with the imagery and voice, blending breath, birdsong, and echoic tones into a sonic weave that holds the work’s emotional resonance in tension and release.
In essence, the film is a meditation on loss, ancestry and the fragile threads that bind memory to landscape. Quiet, surreal and unresolved, it speaks of the many voices that inhabit the natural world and the human need to follow them home.