Clean is 10 minute film about an obsession with drowning. Slow, painfully poignant, and dark; it strings you along until it's done (with you). It was written and directed by Jones, and shot by myself.

CW: drowning

Featuring
Jones (They/Them) - Eveunleashed.com

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In Jones’s words:

“I first thought of filming "clean" while taking a bath in my aunt's tub. She lives in a farm house in Newfoundland and the tub is a huge egg shaped thing deep enough for me to almost float. I was drifting in heaps of bubbles and looking at a bar of soap, a fancy one on a fancy soap dish - neither of which were intended to be used. Both soap and dish were made to look like they were covered in roses. The soap was pale cream, delicately scented.

I noticed it was the same colour as a slip I bought from an antique store a few months before, ivory trimmed in lace. I thought of the slip in the water and in that moment the visual seemed charged and invigorating. With the image of the slip in soapy water, I knew exactly how it would feel to put it on, how it would look beautiful and transparent but also be freezing cold and clinging, uncomfortable. I know how difficult it would be to put on. I stole the bar of soap from my aunt's bathroom and carried it home to where it sat in my underwear drawer for two and a half years waiting.

I filmed clean in one afternoon with Jordan (Pale Crow Films). Working carefully, tenderly, we took our time. And it's beautiful - simple and sparse, stripped bare and a little strange. Clean has a dreamy mood but is also focused, slow and sparse; made as much by what is missing as what there is - not a lot of shots, not a lot of detail, few props, one person, natural light...

The whole idea is wrapped up in absence and abundance, a narrow overflow. the singular focus of imagination. Obsession. It is hard to let someone waterboard you and not spend at least a little bit of that day wondering about your own motivations.

Together we captured a particular bandwidth of emotion, of light and colour and mood. I am so pleased with what we discovered, the emptiness, the light and texture, the trust and small moments. a kind of bleak rich beauty, but I still don't really know what any of it means - why I was so drawn to the soaking dress and the bar of soap, the hair in the water, the gasping breath, but I love the result anyway.”