Sifted Evidence

Directed by Patricia Gruben

Canada, 1982 (experimental / fiction, 42 minutes, colour)

Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

Film Description:
"A woman is telling the story of how she went to Mexico looking for an obscure archaeological site; how she met a man who promised to take her there; how they stayed together locked in cross-purposes and misunderstandings—how, but never why. The central event has been reconstructed through stills, narration, and enactment by two performers in a tableau limited by the boundaries of a front projection screen."
-- Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (source)

(sources)

Quote about Sifted Evidence

"[Sifted Evidence] occupies at least two temporal registers in its narrative about a woman who recounts her trip to Mexico in search of evidence of female deities at the ruins in Tlatilco. The first register is rather like an ethnologist's seminar, complete with slide-show, maps, and artefacts. The second is the memory (repressed by the space of ethnographic knowledge) of the journey itself where she attempts to learn Spanish; finds and loses her way in a 'foreign' country'; meets a Black, Spanish-speaking man, for whom she has an equivocal attraction; and in the dark of night arrives, finally, at the ruins, which contain merely the detritus of colonialism."
-- Susan Lord (source)

Bibliography for Sifted Evidence

Book Chapters

Armatage, Kay. "About to Speak: The Woman's Voice in Patricia Gruben's Sifted Evidence." In Take Two, edited by Seth Feldman, 298-303. Toronto: Irwin, 1984.

Brief Sections of Books

Lord, Susan. "The Scene of the Crime: Genealogies of Absence in the Films of Patricia Gruben." In Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema, edited by Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. (pp. 151-153)