Chinese Ghost Story is a poetic essay in which history and landscape converge to explore the construction of the railroad where 1,300 Chinese laborers lost their lives. There are no stories without places, and places are largely silent to what occurs. The retelling of Pu Songling's (1640-1715) “Kon-Sun-Ju-Liang” sets the counterpoint for this tale of the 1869 Transcontinental Railroad. Throughout the American West, we searched for those absent from the 19th century A.J. Russell photograph documenting the joining together of the eastern and western United States.

The skin of a teddy bear and its synthetic insides....

By manipulating time, we wanted to evoke both the danger as well as the power and euphoria of collective experience.

A great blow-up character succumbs to time

What is a filmmaker? It is this vague, perhaps vain question that Travis Wilkerson hoped to answer clearly when he went to Cuba to question Santiago Alvarez, a legend of militant cinema. Although he had seen none of his films, Wilkerson did an interview with the master that quickly became something of a combined lesson in film and history, with Alvarez presenting his many essays and adding commentary. On returning from his trip, Wilkerson was very disappointed. The camera had recorded nothing of these very warm-hearted, instructive sessions, neither sound nor pictures. Technology had let him down. Alvarez's face and voice vanished, almost at the same time as himself. So only his films remain. His portrait remains to be done, to be made from scratch, from memory. This is why this homage to Alvarez is presented, according to a certain poetic tradition, in the form of a mélange. It includes Wilkerson's autobiographical parts, archive footage, excerpts of films made for Cuban television and pictures taken today, assembled with no concern for hierarchy or precedence.