Stonemason and filmmaker hurdle wall
When a young filmmaker set out to record a novice stonemason’s construction of a 300-metre-long wall, the two men figured it would take eight weeks. They were a bit off — by about eight years.
The nearly decade-long quest — still not completed — is the subject of the documentary film Triumph of the Wall, directed by Bill Stone, BFA 03, and produced by Stone and fellow Concordia alumnus Frederic Bohbot, BA 01.
Triumph of the Wall opens May 31 at the Quad Cinema in New York City and then will play from June 3 to 8 at the Knickerbocker Theater in Holland, Mich.
In 2001, Stone learned that Chris Overing planned to build a massive dry-stone wall in northern Quebec, and the Concordia student headed out on a whim to document the endeavour.
In the resulting film, Stone elegantly and often-humorously depicts Overing’s tedious, difficult wall assembly. As both mason and director realize their projects are spinning off course, the film captures the changing relationship between the two.
While the long process took its toll, the two men persisted. “I have a habit, over the course of my life, of getting into projects that turn out much bigger than I anticipated,” Stone recently told Filmmaker magazine. The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema graduate added: “In film school, my final project was so ridiculously ambitious for the resources available that I was forced to eventually drop it. For Triumph of the Wall, there was still a fear of failure doing the project, despite my drive or desire to finish. But there is a time in life when, as the movie points out, you’re in too deep to quit.”
Under its original title Work in Progress, the documentary film won the Pierre et Yolande Perrault Prize at Les Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois in 2012 and was an official selection at the Victoria Film Festival in 2012 and Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal in 2011.
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