A Western drama about two brothers who are in love with the same girl. When one of them wrongly thinks she has chosen for the other, he leaves for Mexico.
A lone mariachi commits atrocities while under the influence of supernatural forces. When he comes to, he’s arrested and sentenced to death. But Death and The Rattlesnake Witch have other plans. This stop motion western short features a silent film style with a southwest rock soundtrack.
Cataluña S.XIX. Wounded and on horseback, Joaquín arrives at a house inhabited by an old marriage. Although Joaquín seems to be safe under the care of Julián and Amelia, things take on a different turn when he tries to leave the house. This is a short-film about family and grief, and about how our emotions can tragically affect our judgement.
Setting West was made using original printing materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as wood type, borders and stereotypes of “Cowboys and Indians”, trains and bison. These words and images were printed directly onto 35mm clear film stock at eminent letterpress studios in North America: the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago, the Hatch Show Print in Nashville and the Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec & Lovell Litho in Montréal. Judith Poirier printed 1,643 feet of film to produce her abstract western and her technique of printing onto celluloid creates a unique texture on screen, as well as generating an original soundtrack. Setting West reinterprets a classic cinematic genre while exploring a formative period in the history of typography and printing.
The action of this story takes place on the frontier of Kentucky in 1800. Inside a stockade several settlers have their log cabin homes. The family with which we are concerned consists of a frontiersman, his wife and four children, the oldest, Tom, a boy of fourteen, the youngest a baby girl, Ruth. The children have a constant playmate in a magnificent collie dog called Shep. One day the father goes hunting with the other men of the settlement. In their anxiety to be early at the hunting ground they forget to close the gate of the stockade. At about this point the adventure which is portrayed in the picture begins. Ruth sees a favorable opportunity to investigate the region beyond the stockade, and, while her mother is in another part of the cabin and her older sister is busily engaged in poking the ashes in the open fireplace, she quietly walks out of the cabin door and on through the stockade and rambles off into the hills. On returning to the room the mother misses the child.