Om

Om (11 min. 2005) Peter Mettler, Lester Alfonso

I had the great opportunity to be of service to filmmaker Peter Mettler when I was invited to edit together a “sizzle reel” for a documentary project that was to be called Om.

It was 2004, I met Peter at the Om Solstice Festival where he was camped with a crew gathering footage for a possible film. We hit it off and he invited me to take part by giving me a couple of cameras and, later, the hard-drives that contained all the footage and interviews that we (including filmmaker Emma Davie, shot over the week-long festival.)

I approached the footage with a personal editing challenge: No Fades. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to study “hard cuts.” As an editor, I didn’t allow myself to “dissolve” one shot with the next. “Only hard cuts,” I told myself.

I had help and feedback from Steve Rose and Tim Rowat who were kind enough to let me use their edit suite at PowerHouse in Peterborough.

Abandoned after the project stalled in 2005, this resulting “film” remains and has been in deep YouTube for a while divided into two parts. I was going for what I called an “ambient documentary” at the time. It is an eleven minute slice-of-no-oridinary-life at the Om Solstice Festival.

Now in its entirety, I’ve rescued this artifact from the vault to share for the first time in almost fifteen years.

— LA