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Serving as a sort of sketch for the feature length sleep furiously (then provisionally titled The Library Van), Koppel’s gentle short documentary – a charming monochrome portrait of rural life – features many of the same people and themes as the later film. And although it lacks the lyricism and visual splendour of its more illustrious follow up, this earlier version proves more life affirming, eschewing as it does sleep furiously’s politicised pessimism in favour of a more celebratory, upbeat tone.
Koppel spent eight months in the small farming community of Trefeurig, Mid Wales, making this remarkable, elegiac cinepoem, in which farm work, the travels of a mobile library, and the general everyday lives of an ageing population drift in and out of each other, as fears about the closure the village school gradually grow. Mixing awe-inspiring landscape photography with more mundane – but no less absorbing – everyday human activity, the film delicately paints a portrait of an idyllic rural lifestyle, whilst also hinting at the nefarious presence of the "progress" that threatens to bring it to an end.
Being used to seeing Eden Kötting in the hyper-kinetic, formally playful films of her father, Andrew, it comes as something of a pleasant surprise to see her captured here with Gideon Koppel’s more elegant, observational camerawork in this sensuously intimate and gently affecting documentary. Filmed over the course of a week in October 2010, the film captures the everyday life of its Joubert syndrome-suffering protagonist, taking in her daily routines of work, play, and therapy, whilst also capturing her admirable joie de vivre against the backdrop of her loving family life.
