A glimmer of hope. A touch of possibilities. Add a dash of a perspective dating back thirteen-thousand years, season with torrential rains, and the result is Tulare–Return of the Phantom Lake, produced 2025, running time seven-and-a-half minutes.
One of the difficulties when completing a film is knowing when to start and when to stop—and when to continue filming new developments and another chapter?
From the beginning of my filming for Tulare, The Phantom Lake, I had an intuition that the Lake would return, perhaps even return in the form of lake restoration as a reservoir for farming, a wildlife refuge, and a recreational haven. Instead, the powers that be keep insisting on dam construction when to my eyes the dry Tulare Lake bed beckons.
One of the themes I continue to think about with my film work is how the same piece of the earth can mean different things to many different people. Sometimes it seems as if they’re not even describing the same patch of land. As Eileen Apperson said in the film Tulare, The Phantom Lake, how you see the land depends on your intentions for that land.
Tulare, Return of the Phantom Lake is a seven-minute that film told in the words of Archaeologist and Author, Jerry N. Hopkins. As you’ll see, how Jerry views the landscape of the Phantom Lake is very much different from those who farm the Tulare Lake Basin.
