16mm Remix Film · RISD Film Practices · 2023 → 2025
Sacred Providence
A 16mm remix film about returning to a familiar place and experiencing it as sacred, alien, and newly discovered.
Role
Director · Editor · Sound
Year
2023 · remixed 2025
Format
16mm remix film
Course
RISD Film Practices
Subject
The Providence coastline
Guidance
Ramón Rivera-Moret · Carter (TA)
The Idea
A familiar place made sacred
Sacred Providence is a 16mm remix film about returning to a familiar place and experiencing it as sacred, alien, and newly discovered. Begun as my final RISD Film Practices work — originally Sacred Vistas: Chronicles of an Earthbound Runner — it became, on revisiting the footage in 2025, a meditation on place, perception, movement, and memory.
There is no protagonist beyond the camera’s movement, the sound of breathing, and the feeling of traveling through the Providence coastline as an earthbound runner — rocks, water, sunlight, swans, roots, and the textures of the ground.
Process · The 2025 remix
Reversed sound and a negative world
In the remix, sound became the emotional engine: I reversed the audio and placed the full-length version after a negative-film section, creating the sensation of entering and exiting a distorted reality. Providence stops feeling like a familiar coastline and becomes a massive, almost prehistoric unknown.
The negative section is the rupture — swans dissolve, plants shift into heat-map color, the landscape turns orange and strange — before the image returns to ordinary, grounded color, like coming back to one’s senses. Working alone, I was filmmaker, performer, editor, and sound designer at once.
2023 → 2025
Filmed for RISD Film Practices, then remixed two years later
Solo
Filmmaker, performer, editor, and sound designer at once
Negative
Reversed audio and inverted film as the central rupture
The camera becomes the body. The sound becomes the nervous system. The landscape becomes the story.
The Film
Watch the film
Artist Statement
Reflection
Sacred Providence is a 16mm remix film about returning to a familiar place and experiencing it as sacred, alien, and newly discovered. It began as my final work for RISD Film Practices in Fall 2023, originally titled Sacred Vistas: Chronicles Of An Earthbound Runner. Revisiting the footage in 2025 helped me understand that Providence itself was the subject.
The project explores the Providence coastline through rocks, water, sunlight, plants, wind, birds, swans, sidewalks, tree roots, and the textures of the ground — the small details many people pass without noticing. The film works almost like a point-of-view encounter with place, carried by the camera’s movement, the sound of breathing, and the feeling of traveling as an earthbound runner.
In the 2025 remix, sound became the emotional engine. I reversed the audio and placed the full-length version after the negative film section, creating the feeling of entering and exiting a distorted reality. Providence begins to feel less like a familiar coastline and more like a massive rainforest or unknown world.
The negative film section becomes the rupture: swans become difficult to identify, plants shift into heat-map colors, and the landscape turns orange, red, and strange. Eventually the film returns from this escape — the image becomes bright, clear, and recognizable again, and the return to ordinary color feels like relief.
Sacred Providence taught me that a film can be carried by atmosphere rather than plot. There are no traditional characters, yet the film still has a journey: unease, displacement, distortion, recognition, and rest. The camera becomes the body, the sound becomes the nervous system, and the landscape becomes the story. It is a chronicle of running, looking, breathing, and returning — about how the familiar can become sacred when we pay attention long enough.