In Fields of Presence, director Jorge Lozano has an impressionistic “conversation” with his late daughter
Faced with tragedy, Colombian-Canadian film and video artist builds a haunting collage about two indivisible spirits at Vancouver Latin American Film Festival
A young Breanna Lozano as seen in her father’s intimate video “conversation” with his deceased daughter, Fields of Presence
Jorge Lozano
The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival presents Fields of Presence with Jorge Lozano in attendance on September 11 at the Cinematheque
IT WAS ONE IN the morning when the police informed Jorge Lozano about the death of his daughter, Bree. “I don’t know why they come at one o’clock in the morning,” he says, in a call to Stir. “And then everybody leaves and I think, ‘What the fuck am I going to do?’”
What he did was go to bed. It was either that or “go crazy”. When the 72-year-old Colombian-Canadian film and video artist woke the next morning, his work on Fields of Presence began. “I had this feeling inside,” he recounts, “of a presence of Bree, grabbing herself inside my body, telling me, ‘Don’t let me go…’. And that was constant. Almost every day, I could feel this. I could almost hear her voice, ‘Don’t let me go…’.”
The body of 46-year-old Breanna Lozano was found at Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park in March, 2021. The homicide investigation remains open. Receiving its world premiere on September 11 at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, with Lozano in attendance, Fields of Presence is a haunting collage of vision and sound, conceived as an impressionistic “conversation” between the artist and his daughter, with Lozano’s onscreen text orbiting Gamble’s image and voice in an intimate duologue. “The conversation in the film is based on images that I shot many years ago with her in different formats, and her photography, and her music, her singing, which I heard in bits, but never altogether. And I love her voice, and her lyrics.”
Lozano builds a picture of a fiercely intelligent and creative woman with a strong activist streak, coupled with a father’s apprehension of a child that, like any parent, he could never fully know. Among its more poignant moments is Lozano expressing his delight in discovering that Bree was “borrowing” his professional equipment to make impressive (and very funny) 16mm film and home video works in her youth.
As such, it would be glib to describe the project as that of a father processing his grief. Fields of Presence is engaged in a much more vital kind of communication between two indivisible spirits. “It goes maybe beyond metaphysics, it’s genetics too,” Lozano suggests. “Your kids are within you and you are within them. It’s just one big organism.”
The process, he says, was pleasurable. “It’s like being with someone that is alive,” he continues. “That was the sensation. I would go to bed and think about what I did and wake up in the morning and something would trigger something else. The whole thing is never that faithful to the historical moment. It is mostly a new thing. A new something that belongs to her and to me.”
This method is also at the core of Lozano’s decades-long practice. “I work in film and video,” he says, “so I usually respond to things using those mediums. I don’t see it as a profession, I see it more as a form of life. The work that I do is the way that I see the world. I film a lot and then later on I begin talking to the material. It isn’t the past anymore. It takes on a new life, basically. It’s the same thing with this film. I did the same thing responding to the situation.”
Lozano began to dabble in Super 8 film and primitive video production after leaving Colombia for Toronto in the early 70s, where he found an immediate home inside the city’s ferment of experimental artists. While Vancouver was more “hippy,” he says, “Toronto, New York were more urban, down and out, No Wave, whatever—very underground, a massive production of works in all disciplines that were breaking boundaries. Very exciting times, and I come from that, and my work has always been that way—fragmented, difficult sometimes to understand, but it is reflection on images, on the nature of doing and being, more than storytelling.”
That might be the best description of Fields of Presence, which caps a sizeable body of work. Where it deviates from Lozano’s usual approach is in its heart-wrenching final moments, when he strolls through Beacon Hill Park with his granddaughter, monitored, sometimes in dizzying split-screen, by four separate drones. It was the only sequence that Lozano planned from the start, and it shook him.
“I just didn’t expect that it was so beautiful, the park, the landscape, the ocean,” he says. “That was a little bit more difficult, when the camera started going up, and I began feeling sad, because I knew the film was going to end and therefore she would be a memory that I would carry on for the rest of my life. Because I would not continue talking with her. I would let her go. Because she needs to die, too, right? Or to continue death.”
As it happens, the idea of continuing death comports with a tradition Lozano recalls from Afro-Colombian communities, where the departing spirit is helped on its journey by a week of group singing. “They create a tunnel of sound with their voices to get the soul of the person into the world of the dead,” he explains. “Because it they don’t do that, this person is going to be bothering them for the rest of their lives. And I began doing exactly the same thing, chanting, chanting, and trying to bring her out. Basically, my body was a tunnel.”
What remains, three years later, is a poetic fusion of Lozano's memory with the physical traces inscribed in media, and a twilight condition in which Bree “is alive, and also she’s not”. For the viewer, we're privileged with access to what Lozano insists "is a real conversation. It is not a fiction. It felt like a conversation during the whole making. She was there," he says, "present, conversing.” 
Fields of Presence.
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