The tree here is an ancient American Elm standing in Tompkins Square Park in New York. It’s named 'The Hare Krishna Tree' because an Indian spiritual leader founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness nearby. Meticulously edited, frame by frame, the tree comes to life, more than 40 years after the images were shot.

The Tree

Henry Hills is among the film artists who, like filmmaker Abigail Child, marries frenetically fast image montage with split-second music and sound editing: the changes in rhythm and mood stream so fast they create a giddy delirium in the spectator. SOCIAL SKILLS provides Hills with the perfect subject: discontinuous fragments from a 60-day class in liberated body movement led by David Zambrano in Belgium. The soundtrack does the splits between disco funk and cartoon noise effects. Is it dance, childlike play, or the Utopian vision of a community of negotiated differences? It is all of these things at once.