News / Index Drift — Garret Harkawik

For the past 18 months or so I have been working on several documentary projects and somewhere along the way I realized that I saw a lot of overlap in their themes. I’ve been thinking about doing an anthology project for quite a while, but these projects were the first time I felt like I had a complimentary group of films that would make sense to play off of each other. So I recut them as one piece and decided to continue working in this fashion. The overarching project is called Index Drift, and it will be an ongoing non-fiction anthology series, released very intermittently.

The first volume is called “Through a Deep Culture” and follows four stories over seven chapters. It features new material shot over the past year, along with found footage and stuff I shot over a decade ago. The project is entirely modular, and hence it can be viewed as one 44-minute piece or as individual sections. The main through line concerns Jesse Bessette (otherwise known as the Bennington Batman) as he attempts to maintain his tenuous grasp on a normal life.

The whole thing will premiere later this week at Plex Arts Fest in Burlington. A section of it called “Mother’s House” will be screening at the Vermont Film & Folklore Festival on Friday and Saturday as well.

You can view a trailer for the first installment below:

I’ll be having more screenings of the complete piece as well as excerpts in the near future. Index Drift will be released online starting in 2025. Volume 2 is already mostly complete and I’m shooting material for volume 3 currently.

And if you would like me to screen Through A Deep Culture somewhere, get in touch.

Announcing My New Anthology Series “Index Drift”