Dust in the Gate
2025 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Alan Code
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, surreal
An experimental documentary building a soundscape of Kingston, Ontario from still images, time-lapse, and binaural field recordings.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A three-minute essay film about Kingston, Ontario built from stills and field recordings—sounds like the definition of boring, except Code refuses to let the image and sound sync up in any expected way, which is genuinely unsettling and kind of brilliant.
Dust in the Gate sits squarely in the lineage of experimental documentary and the essay film tradition, with the formal rigor of someone who understands how binaural sound design can restructure our relationship to the photographic image.
The decision to let the binaural recordings drift independently from what we're seeing—treating sound as its own temporal plane rather than illustration—is the hinge that makes this whole thing work on a shoestring approach.