Driving Force (2023)
Joanie Wind
Driving Force, Joanie Wind, USA, digital, 17.5 min, 2023
Driving Force journeys through the banality of ecocide, circling metaphorical parallels in the capitalist treatment of nature, workers, and women. Recurring stress dreams about natural disasters and a loss of control conjure up questions about reason, rugged individualism, conquest, and the apocalyptic madness of greed. With equal amounts of sarcasm and unflinching vulnerability, the narrator ponders impending cataclysm and whether to bring children into a world seemingly marked for destruction. Painterly compositions reveal the frenzy of this moment ostensibly at the end of human civilization, using metaphor to examine the forces behind such a culmination. Amid the hopelessness, paranoia, and despair emerges an absurd beauty and sense of hope that submits to whatever comes next.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with College for Creative Studies and Arts Council Windsor and Region.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits and stills courtesy of the artist © Joanie Wind.
About the artist
Joanie Wind (USA) is a filmmaker and painter artist born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1987. She sources nostalgic imagery of Americana—Southwest deserts, Midwest farmlands, meme culture, and smartphone interfaces—and melts them together in a metaphorical performance of conquest, alienation, escapism, consumerism, and existential dread, plummeting viewers into a dystopian space of anxiety and despair. She received an MFA from Eastern Michigan University (2015). Her previous video works, including This One Weird Trick (2020), Girls Grow Up Drawing Horses (2019), and Grate American Cheese Again (2018), have screened at numerous festivals locally and internationally, winning awards from Santiago Indie Film, Video Art Festival Turku, Porto Femme International Film Festival, Chhatrapati Shivaji Film Festival, Mannheim Arts and Film Festival, Worldfest Houston, Tatras International Film Festival, Paradise Film Festival, and Drunken Film Fest, among others. She undertook a residency at Hatch Art Collective in Hamtramck (2017) and worked as education and outreach coordinator for Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives and works in Detroit, where she is an adjunct professor at College for Creative Studies.