Hand Crafted Films

A hypnotic meditation on memory, technology, and the landscapes—both digital and physical—that shape our creative impulses, Mather blends personal narrative with archival imagery and experimental visuals. It follows a filmmaker and landscape architect reflecting on his childhood obsession with a little-known Atari 2600 game set in a pixelated French garden. When mere gameplay wasn’t enough, he hacked the cartridge with a soldering iron, reshaping the virtual world into a dynamic, glitch-filled landscape—an experience that would unexpectedly foreshadow his future in filmmaking and design.

As he modified the game’s rigid structure, stripping away objectives and unlocking new pathways, he also crafted amateur Super-8 films that reimagined his suburban surroundings—transforming woods into hideouts, highways into cinematic escapes. Mather draws striking parallels between these creative acts, exploring how video game hacking, filmmaking, and landscape architecture all require an intuitive balance between control and chaos, structure and spontaneity.

Through layered visuals and an evocative soundscape, Mather invites viewers into a world where digital glitches mirror the unpredictability of real landscapes, and where the urge to explore and manipulate space becomes a form of storytelling. At once a personal recollection and a larger meditation on design, nostalgia, and the artistic possibilities of technology, the film reimagines the boundary between the real and the virtual—one pixel at a time.

2025
Short
U.S.A.
English
8 minutes
Evan Mather