Motion/Static

"I don't think a showman ever really retires…until he's passed away," says Victor Reeves, himself the eternal showman, without bitterness. This short film is an impressionistic portrait of his Scottish showpeople family. Victor, his daughter Kendal, and sons Clayton and Jackson are all in the business. All four talk of their various reasons for wanting to continue working in the circus world. The pragmatic yet poetic accounts of their lives (always on the road, but somehow unchanging) are interwoven with voice-over recollections of a child's dreams of the circus. "One night, when he was a boy, I heard him shout out in his sleep: 'Where's my Ferris wheel?' I imagined flashing color lights and the sound of laughter emanating from his sweaty forehead, and I wondered: what kind of phantasm could trigger such an outcry?" As the film's title suggests, its visual rhythm adjusts to the tempo of the lives of the Reeves family, with exuberant images of swirling circus rides and flashing lights sometimes slowed down, sometimes sped up.