The singular Deborah Stratman (O’er the Land) spins an experimental counter-narrative to how the Midwest was won, from false gods to the violence of war, with stories geographically scattered across the Prairie State. Slyly shifting between locales, she touches on themes of faith, technology and transience, all the while exploring the sometimes narrow divide between the rational and the supernatural.Using every cinematic arrow in her quiver – reenactments, 16mm observational and archival footage, text and voiceover – Stratman’s tour-de-force essay singlehandedly illuminates and reframes our past. The result is a mythos located somewhere between recorded history and the soaring imagination of its author. (PC)