Name: American Dendrite
Start: 2025-09-21T12:30:00-05:00
Location: The Harper Theater

American Dendrite
Dir. Adam Marshall Present | USA | 75 min | DCP | Super 8mm | Midwest Premiere
Shot entirely on vintage Super 8mm during a road trip from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico, American Dendrite is a meditative and quietly radical portrait of the country as seen through its water. Director Adam Marshall Present follows the flow of the Mississippi River system, collecting a chain of conversations from people living along its banks, each participant responding not to a question, but to the thoughts of the person upstream.
The result is a time capsule of the American moment, intimate, reflective, and fluid in form. What emerges is a subtle chorus of hope, uncertainty, and shared humanity in the face of climate change, division, and historical trauma. As the river branches and bends, so too does the film, into questions of place, memory, and connection in a fractured country still held together by the land and water that runs through it.
A game of telephone meets a climate elegy, American Dendrite is a uniquely analog vision of the present, one that listens, flows, and resonates.