“I Will Never Finish It,” Says Alma Rennick, Holding Her Third Prize for It
Alma Rennick tells the Brine Hall she will never complete Low Water Mark. Festival programmer Beatrix Hallow asks who made that choice, and produces an email.
Alma Rennick is holding a glass trophy shaped like a fish bone when she says it. "I will never finish it." She says it into the microphone at the Brine Hall in Kelp Row, nine minutes after collecting the third prize in eleven months for a film she calls "a rough cut with ambitions."
The film is Low Water Mark. It runs 94 minutes. The last 22 are a locked-off shot of a ferry ramp at dawn, with a temporary music track still on it, a cello that gives up mid-phrase. The subtitles stop in reel four. A card in Rennick's own handwriting says only: ending to come.
Juries adore this. They write "bravely unresolved." I call it a sandwich left open on a bench. I have seen it three times, once hoping somebody would close it.
The first seventy minutes are real cinema, I will say that plainly. A woman splices ferry rope in a shed on the Long Pier. Nobody explains her. Rennick holds on her hands for so long that you start to count the strands. It is the best patience I have seen on a Port Vesper screen this decade.
Then Beatrix Hallow, who programmes the festival and was moderating, did what moderators almost never do. She asked a second question. "Who decided it's unfinished?"
Rennick said the money ran out. Hallow said the lab had offered her eleven days of finishing time in March. "I have the email." Rennick said eleven days is not an ending. Hallow said no, but she had refused them before anyone knew what the days would make.
This is the whole matter, and I will put it in one line for the people at the back. Unfinished is a state. Unfinishable is a decision. The distance between them is eleven days and a signature.
Rennick answered with the best sentence of her evening. "An ending is a lie told to be polite." It is a lovely line. It would also be a lovely line in a film that had an ending. The room applauded. I wrote one word in my notebook, and the word was March.
The trophy, for the record, is missing a fin. Rennick told me afterwards that this was deliberate. I rang the engraver. It was a Tuesday.
