‘Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then,’ a 2010 film directed by Brent Green, is a remarkable experimental film and a perfect entry for discussion in the ongoing Creativity in Focus series which is sponsored by the SLC Film Center and the Salt Lake Art Center.

Produced on a budget of just $50,000, Green’s film, his first-feature length entry, is a testimony of love and respect for the true story of Leonard Wood, a resourceful hardware store employee, who turned his Kentucky home into a peculiar ‘healing machine’ for his wife Mary, who is losing her battle against cancer. The film will be screened for free Friday, April 8, at 7 p.m. in the Salt Lake Art Center auditorium.

The film’s dreamy and hypnotic mix of animation, live action and stop-motion hints of a blended influences from filmmakers such as Michel Gondry, Guy Maddin, and Werner Herzog. Green, a self-taught filmmaker whose short films have been screened at Sundance and at numerous art and media centers, did everything from writing, animating, scoring, and narrating the film to recreating plank by plank Wood’s residential complex, complete with towers, sheds, platforms, and stairs.

The 75-minute film intrigues because of the wealth of ingenious folk-like charms and eccentricities not only in the details of this couple’s love story but also in Green’s own quavering narrative that openly contemplates larger questions and if, indeed, there is some supreme divine presence to welcome those who pass from their earthly existence. Green is an unabashedly romantic admirer of Wood’s touching story.

The actors who portray the couple — Michael McGinley and Donna K. — assisted in the film’s writing and seem to capture their peculiarities with convincing impact. Describing his first meeting with Mary, whose hobby is harvesting wild birds’ eggs, Leonard says, ‘that wasn’t a date, that was a car crash.’ A perennially restless tinkerer, Leonard knocks out walls, adds extensions, and builds a tower in the hopes that it will make contact with heaven. Two of the film’s most memorably striking images show Mary walking next to the house on giant stilts, and a grieving Leonard placing a halo of electric bulbs around Mary’s head shortly after she died. Green’s boldness in filmmaking provides an excellent object lesson for young creative producers to think unconventionally about their capacity for empowering emotional expression.

A review in Art in America summarizes the film quite well:

‘Green narrates the tale in a voice tremulous with urgency. Wood?s enterprise was a matter of faith and will, devotion and love, and Green seems to feel much the same. He keeps the boundary between physical reality and emotional truth fluid, and the constellation of work that results exudes authenticity and a raw, visceral power.’

The film has been screened at more than 50 venues including festivals in Sweden, Poland, Argentina, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, and Slovakia. Green sometimes provides live narration and music at the screenings as well. Incidentally, he also has collaborated with Califone, the band behind last month’s Creativity in Focus screening of ‘All My Friends Are Funeral Singers.’

The series, sponsored by 3Form, will continue this year with films to be announced.