This short film was created as part of a course called Materializing Resistance [Studio Session with Sarah Christie. A-B Projects, 2023] and was inspired by the following dream:

I am walking into a cafeteria for lunch and am very hungry. As soon as I enter the space and smell all the food I have a sinking feeling that I might not be able to eat any of this food because of my Celiac disease. I find someone who works there and let them know I have an allergy to gluten and ask if there is anything I can eat. The person says no and my body folds in on itself as I hear the weight of this news. I continue to walk through the cafeteria with a porcelain tray in my arms. By the time I reach the till I am feeling very angry ~ all this delicious food surrounding me and I can’t eat any of it. I lift the porcelain tray above my head and with great force hurl it toward to ground. It shatters in a million pieces.

It was the moment where the porcelain tray went from being whole to shattering in a million pieces that felt most powerful. In the dreamwork practice I do we transit into the perspective of ‘other’ and when I entered into the body of the porcelain tray at the moment of impact there was such a release of tears and surrender in coming face-to-face with needing to accept the shattering truth of my illness with Celiac and the knowing my life must change drastically in order for me to to listen to the limits of my body and nourish it with good and healthy food.

Up until this point in my life I had still been unwilling to fully accept the truth of what Celiac disease meant and was unwilling to make the necessary changes but something shifted for me in this dream where I was able to admit the truth.

It often takes accepting difficult realities before any significant changes can be made. Perhaps, in sitting with this short film, one can begin to live into the following question:

How do we overcome a stubborn resistance to change but also materialize the power or capacity to resist an imposing or impeding force?

Filmed by Jennifer Bass