The film, shot in and around Oxford and narrated by Vanessa Redgrave as and ex-lover of the titular fictional researcher, was made with the support of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Royal College of Art and the BFI, as part of an AHRC Landscape and Environment project titled 'The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image', a 'three-year research project which set out to explore received ideas about mobility, belonging and displacement in terms of landscape and images of landscape, in a context of economic and environmental change'.
Keiller's film is one of three works produced as part of the three-year project; historian Patrick Wright is completing a monograph on past and present ideas of settlement and landscape, while social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey is writing an essay to accompany Keiller's film, examining place as an event and how film-making as a process 'can constitute a method with which to research spatial and other, related subjects'.
The BFI plans a November 19 theatrical release, after screenings at the Venice, London and New York film festivals.
