ABOUT

Edgelands, directed by Ben Weaver, is a land and water based film series applying “relationship” as a method of storytelling. Through regional packraft and bicycle journeys within the Mississippi River watershed within a 100 mile radius of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, Edgelands will explore the stories, histories, and relationships of the people who live here.

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Help us realize Episode 1. If you are an organization, brand, or individual interested in sponsoring or financially contributing to the completion of Edgelands, please contact us. We appreciate your support.

Special thanks to our current partners Osprey Packs, Alpacka Raft, Wild Flower Bikes, Big Agnes, Kokatat, Bending Branches / Aqua Bound, Ridge Merino, and Cedaero and Inter-Fluve.

Director’s Statement – Ben weaver

By my definition, Edgelands are fugitive refuges situated along the edges of normative settler-colonial; social, physical and emotional infrastructure. The vacant lot with burr oak and black raspberries where old mattresses and tires are abandoned. Coyotes in the dog park, queer celebration and festival, bodies living with terminal illness and disability, sandhill cranes resting in the wetland beneath the flight path. Edgelands are places where something “else” is happening, where life is persisting despite the encroachments of the dominant system, physical, emotional and geographical. 

As we face climate injustice and work to dismantle systemic racism, Edgelands are crucial spaces because they model the wisdom of reciprocity and inter-being. They remind us that we do not need to go half way across the world to have a spiritual awakening. This myth about seeking is a facet of the settler colonial enterprise. The truth that all life is linked through relationship is scattered everywhere. A boulder, tree or river in Yosemite is not any more wise than a boulder, tree or river in the city. It is not where we go, but how we relate to where we are.    

Edgelands is an episodic series looking closely at our deep and diverse  relationships to earth, while zooming out to contextualize the history and complexity of those connections. Earth manifest life through relationship and in alignment with that truth, the stories of Edgelands have emerged throughout a series of regional adventures, told by the voices of my friends and community membners. Many of whom I work with at the intersection of climate justice, racial justice and other aspects of cultural repair.

Policy Alone will never solve the deeper cultural struggles we currently face, Nor will it heal us. Edgelands is an invitation to look elsewhere, to glimpse our capacity for reciprocity and resilience in the unkept spaces which are often right here, just under our nose. On our home ground, within our existing networks of community. Healing does not start in the middle. It begins at the edges and gradually moves towards the center. We all overlap. 

Music for Free follows musician and poet Ben Weaver as he rides down the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route 2700 miles from Banff Canada to the US Mexico border offering free concerts to the people in the communities along the way while simultaneously searching for the common threads that connect all human beings.

In the summer of 2018, musician and poet Ben Weaver along with filmmaker Keenan DesPlanques pedaled the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, 3,000 miles from Banff, Alberta, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico for the Music For Free tour.

Ben and Keenan rode self supported with instruments and camera gear, stopping along the route for 16 scheduled performances, but adding in shows as the opportunities spontaneously presented themselves.

Their film, Music For Free, is a beautiful journey down the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, exploring wilderness, what it means to be wild, and examining the common denominators that unify all humans who share this planet.

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