Somewhere along the way, most of us reach a point in life at which we come to terms with who we are and how and where we fit into the varying communities in which we live. Part and parcel with this understanding comes a level of comfort and confidence. And every once in a while, often when we least expect it, in what would otherwise be the most mundane of circumstances, somebody randomly interacts
with us in a way that forces us to gaze upon ourselves through the lens of how others see us and that can forever alter our perception of how we fit into the world. Through an innovative blend of documentary audio and mixed media visuals, Seven Ways From Sunday compellingly chronicles a series of these unexpectedly startling moments of personal revelation, resulting in a powerful meditation on how seemingly fleeting moments of human contact can have profound long-term repercussions. Seven Ways From Sunday started out as a traditional talking head documentary, but during production it became clear that wasn’t how we wanted to tell these stories as that style didn’t relate the overwhelming loss of control our narrators told us they felt during the interactions the film recounts. And so we chose not to show anyone and instead use unique metaphorical stand-ins for each narrator and a rapid-fire visual style that was particularly influenced by imagist poetry so as to convey what Ezra Pound describes as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” In the end, Seven Ways From Sunday is as much an experimental film as it is a documentary in that it intentionally subverts documentary conventions so as to allow viewers to actively imagine what the all too real events described in the film were like for those who experienced them.
