Omer Fast: Godville

Godville (2004) is constructed from interviews with eighteenth-century character interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum in Virginia, USA.  The museum is sited in the historical town that it recreates, preserving the town’s buildings and grounds while training and paying its residents to act out Colonial American life. The characters in Godville represent a cross-section of the town’s resident reenactors — men and women of varying social standing and origin, democrats and republicans, property holders and day labourers, militants and housewives, part-time revolutionaries and slaves — interviewed in their assigned eighteenth-century settings and period garments.  Godville tells the story of a town whose residents are unmoored and floating somewhere in between America’s past and present, fantasy and reality.

Omer Fast is pre-occupied with the way conventional documentary approaches misrepresent and distort history. His ruminations have a multilayered elegance that is subtle, humorous, and continuingly overlapping between time, memory and location.