Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones. In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, near Orillia, Ontario, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and abstract. – Stephen Broomer

Keith Lock’s mesmeric pastoral diary film Everything Everywhere Again Alive... Lock shot the film in the early 70s during a period in which he lived at Buck Lake, Ontario, as part of a commune of artists who built and maintained a homestead in the wilderness, inspired by the back to the land movement. The film captures the progress of their project as they erect buildings, till the land, wrangle animals and reconnect with a natural world that modern society has largely discarded or consumed. It is perhaps in the avant-garde flourishes found in unusual sound design, intermittent colour fields and the presence of patterns and hieroglyphs imposed on the images that the film’s ritualistic undertones are made manifest. – Sight and Sound