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One Drift and We All Go Home was born of two pauses, the first lasting two weeks and the second lasting 23 years.
The former began in July 1998, when gillnetter Tom Hilton uncapped his camcorder on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. With fellow commercial fishermen confined to shore by a government-ordered fishing stoppage on the Cook Inlet, Hilton set about capturing the camp’s clambakes, one-liners and fading hopes for a profitable summer.
At the time, he aimed to submit a feature documentary to the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, but given his lack of directing and editing experience, that ambition stalled. After all, Hilton had a 30-year fishing career to continue.
Then, last year brought a happenstance baton-passing, described in the opening moments of One Drift and We All Go Home, which was assembled and co-directed by Hilton’s son, Thom: “Last February, my dad sent me a care package: a camcorder, a handful of Hi8 tapes, and a T-shirt…they all smelled like smoked salmon.”
Thom Hilton, a Portland actor, writer and filmmaker, shaped his father’s raw footage into the 14-minute short that will premiere at the Oxford Film Festival on March 25 (and will be streamable anywhere via festival pass March 27-April 3).
The junior Hilton says he initially explored the care package’s tapes out of boredom, later creating a 40-minute cut for his father as a gift. That was supposed to be the end of it, until encouragement from friends and a series of films nudged Thom toward officially tackling the project.
Thom took a twisty road to One Drift. First, he encountered the short film Trade Center by Adam Baran (who produced One Drift), which collages audio interviews into an underground gay history of the World Trade Center. Then, he acted in the movie Swan Song starring Udo Kier, a vignette-driven film ripe with small-town eccentricities. Finally, like many cinephiles in 2020, he was struck by the unvarnished performances by blue-collar non-actors in Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning film Nomadland.
“[One Drift] is kind of like an episode of The Muppet Show,” says Thom, emphasizing the film’s comedic face. “Stakes on a human level are incredibly high. Everything is falling apart, but the most important thing to everybody is the joke.”
One Drift finds its rat-a-tat pulse in the camp’s constant cracks about the weather, antacid dependencies, and being flat broke. To an extent, the fishermen delivering their best material to Tom’s camera lens masks their growing impatience with the stoppage’s indefinite span.
“Nobody wants to believe they’re going to lose money,” Thom says. “And those moments before it is confirmed that you have lost money, people have no idea what to do.”
Ironically, for a project defined by found footage, Thom almost withheld key scenes of a father-son fishing trip circa 2001. Initially hesitant to foreground the family relationship that created One Drift, Thom changed his mind because of a line of dialogue from Wes Anderson’s 2021 anthology film The French Dispatch.
“‘That’s the reason for it to be written,’” quotes Thom, recalling what magazine editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) tells reporter Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) when he finds out the writer has omitted a poignant anecdote from an article, leaving it stranded in his notes. After seeing the film, Thom went home and sent the father-son footage to his producer.
“Adam was like, ‘That’s it. That has to be the beginning and the end,’” Thom remembers. Because of that choice, the viewer understands at once that fishing is Tom’s chosen method for bonding and that the camcorder is a vessel of affection between father and son, just as it was between Tom and his Alaska compatriots.
Created by time, love and coincidence, One Drift appears to be the definition of a one-off project. Thom is looking toward the future and preparing to direct a suite of four original shorts, the first of which will begin production this June in Rhododendron, Ore., following a fundraising screening of Kogonada’s Columbus (2017) at the Clinton Street Theater on April 24.
For his part, the elder Hilton owns Hanthorn Crab Company and Pier 39 Seafood in Astoria, serves on the city council there, and exercises his creativity penning fisher poetry, as seen near the film’s conclusion.
Right now, One Drift and We All Go Home is living out a sweeter version of the summer feeling it preserves—a unifying, suspended instant of respirating memory. It won’t be the same tomorrow.
SEE IT: One Drift and We All Go Home streams March 27-April 3 at 2022oxff.eventive.org.