A journey through summer and the grandeur of the West.
Jared Iler’s Homewaters is a fluid and poetic narrative that runs like fish in a river. It is narrated by an aging man, who reflects on his early manhood when he fished the rivers in the Absarokee mountain range in Wyoming. While watching this film, you feel like you are gliding through a floating poem and swaying along with the lazy summer water. It has a nostalgic and dream-like hue that leaves you feeling serene.
Iler’s shots of the Absarokees exalt their sheer magnitude and stature, and he films the South Fork River in a way that proves calming and reflective to the two young friends (the narrator in his youth and his friend Charlie) and to the audience.
These boys are the essence of Wyoming, joking as they leisurely fly-fish for trout in the July afternoon. They demonstrate their technique — an abiding movement that mimics the constant flow of the river. Their intimacy with the trout is like watching a couple in love dance.
As the film comes to an end the voices of the narrator and his younger self merge as they reflect and recite a line from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac , “What was big was not the trout but the chance. What was full was not the creel but my memory.”
This film is not just for fishermen. It is a tale of friendship and of treasured memories. It is a tribute to the West and the grandeur of Wyoming. It is a poem that journeys through two boys’ summer as if it were your own.
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Watch Homewaters here.
