Roadkill expeditions and a basement full of decaying food: behind the scenes on a film about rot

A bright green kiwi sprouts mould, then collapses in on itself. Worms devour leaves, leaving behind veins and eventually, nothing else. Dermestid beetles curl up for a rest on the scales of a spiny-tailed lizard.  

These are just three of many moments in the film Wrought, a stunning visual look at the breakdown of living things, by living things, into new components — through decomposition, fermentation and decay.  

It begins with that universal moment of disappointment: despite our best efforts, our food has gone bad. But instead of turning away in disgust, Wrought zooms in with curiosity through time-lapse photography. 

The name of the film itself is a play on words. 

"Wrought" is a homonym for "rot," and this natural process — the evolution of life and death — is exactly what artists Anna Sigrithur and Joel Penner are following in their work: how do we perceive death, decomposition and rebirth?

And what does that look like? Well, time-lapses of rotting food and carcasses, actually. 

Sigrithur is a writer, artist and food researcher, and Penner makes art films with computer scanners and time-lapse photography. Both are based in Winnipeg. We spoke to them about the process of making Wrought.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell me the origin story of this project. 

Anna Sigrithur: Joel and I have been collaborators on a few projects, largely doing some urban wild weed identification walks and things, and cooking classes. 

And then in 2016, Joel and I both happened to be in Europe.... We met up in Berlin. We had a mutual friend there who's a kind of fermentation instructor. And we were just talking about both of our interests and artistic practices — Joel with his incredible stop-motion videos that he does with the flatbed scanners … and then myself [with] my food studies and culinary arts practice, in which I've been just increasingly interested in microbes.

Joel Penner: I had been doing these time-lapse films for a couple years, about decay and stuff, and Anna brought the conceptual aspect of it, and a framework for what I was doing. And yeah, we also just had a lot of similar interests and a shared passion for a lot of the subjects in the film.

I was surprised by the beauty of the film. Were either of you surprised? Or because of your past work, did you expect it to look this visually rich and gorgeous?

JP: That's one of the main messages of the film — just the idea that these things that we don't consider to be beautiful actually are when you look at them in a different way. I think we were all surprised at the types of things that we found. And we were just excited to share that with people.

AS: I'm someone who actually wanted to see more ugliness, and maybe less bright colours all the time. But of course, I'm not the visual artist here. So it was an interesting thing for me to sort of just see [Joel's] vision. And obviously, you can see the result — it's fantastic. 

But I think that, yes, the message of the film is that it's important to see these natural processes as beautiful, but it's also equally important to not just value that which is beautiful, right? 

Rot is a process that is kind of categorically and definitionally disgusting to humans, and for some good reason, right? But it's also extremely critical for all life processes.

If I were to just walk into your filming setup — like, walk into the room — what would it look like to me? What would I see or hear in the room?

JP: A lot of the film was shot with flatbed scanners, so there was the constant sound of the scanner motors going.

Like 24/7? Like, it's just running all day?

JP: Yeah, a couple time-lapses going at once. So just a bunch of scanners going at once and then camera shutters going off every few minutes, or a few every few seconds. We did some animal time-lapses in an insulated enclosure outside so there's air filters with that, and heaters. So yeah, a lot of fun mechanical noises.

AS: And the sound of Joel's roommates complaining about the smell.

Well, I have to ask about the smell. I heard many people are curious about it, and you get asked about it a lot. So how bad did it get? How did you live with that?

JP: Yes, that was a really funny part of it. This was, like, a micro-budget production, so a lot of the fruit decay shots were shot in a basement of a shared house. My roommates and I became used to the smells, but then friends who came over noticed it. 

For a while, there were just thousands of fruit flies. And then after a while, I learned how to control them by putting the scanners in tents to stop [the flies] from hopping around to every piece of produce. 

There was just all these funny situations, like storing the animals that we found on the highway in my freezer. And then I would also store them in my parents' freezer, but then my mom was more into it than my dad, so she would help me sneak them into their freezer.

Did you drive around looking for dead animals? Or were you driving somewhere and you saw a dead animal and you thought, 'Oh, I can use this'?

AS: Oh, we drove around.

JP: Yeah, we went on a couple roadkill expeditions.

AS: There is a large amount of roadkill on some Manitoba highways.

Tell me a little bit about some of the communities that were interested in this film.

JP: So far, it's generally been the fermentation community. And definitely, fungi have been on people's minds a lot over the past 10 to 15 years…. And back-to-the-land [movements].… I think all these different interests align with people maybe being frustrated with our industrial and corporate-driven society, and that sentiment has led people to want to learn more about these processes that we were more attuned to in the past.

AS: And the natural death, green burial people — that's also another big one. People who are thinking about what's going to happen to their own bodies, and kind of actively working towards letting them decay rather than prevent that through various other means that we've all concocted as a society.

JP: There's just a general curiosity about all these life processes and our relationship with the rest of nature, that people often feel so disconnected from in modern society.

AS: Fermentation has also been one of these really big cultural phenomena. It's grown really popular in the last 15 years-ish. Something interesting that's happened with that, and has been a driving force for that, is this idea of fermentation that's a metaphor for something bigger — maybe social change or transformation, right? 

Because, you know, the process of fermentation is a transformational process. And I think the fact that it's also centrally relying on a relationship with microbes — which, in the last 200 years, Western food processing practices [have] really eradicated microbes and sanitized and sterilized the microbiological landscape of our food system, and also our bodies, as we're learning more and more. 

You've said this is ultimately a hopeful film. What do you mean by that?

JP: For me, I think the basic, most hopeful aspect of photography is that it shows you the beauty that exists everywhere. Especially with the subjects in the film, the perspective shift this awareness can provide one with is inherently hopeful I think.

And I think also in terms of focusing on the cycle of life and this broader idea of trying to break down the barrier that we conceive of in terms of humans being separate from nature. In my mind, it shows you how we're completely connected with everything else…. It's, like, connecting our stories to the story of a much bigger whole that we don't totally understand.

AS: And I find hope in the idea of Wrought being a call to a greater sense of being part of something, being part of this universe, and sort of just the ongoing massive material and energetic transformation that constitutes the universe — then trying to see ourselves in it while we're here. 

And as the film says: What do we preserve? And what do we leave to rot? And how do we make that choice?

Watch Wrought on CBC Gem.