All Fall Down is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question "what has been here before?" The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal land rights activist) and the other contemporary, writer George Lachlan Brown (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker's step daughter) across two hundred years. The film explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that express the complexity of time and the politics of land.

The paintings and writings of Homer Watson and Paul Kane are featured and explored in the film, along with writers George Orwell and Wallace Stevens. Contemporary figures such as organic farmer and raw milk advocater Michael Schmidt also appears in the film. Composers Toni Edelmann and Tucker Zimmerman have created the music for the film and the film was co-written with Janine Marchessault.

The film is structured through Hoffman's extraordinary landscapes of Southern Ontario which make the temporal fabric shimmer, bringing us a meditation on childhood, property, colonialism, ecology, and love.

"All Fall Down smartly references Wallace Stevens's classic modernist poem 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,' which analyzes how different perspectives can seem utterly irreconcilable yet completely logical depending on the context. As Brown's entreaties to his unnamed former wife grow more disconnected and outrageous, we start questioning how much we actually know about people and what constitutes a personality. Is the real George Lachlan Brown the person we hear on the voicemails, the father playing with his daughter in the home movies or someone else entirely? Hoffman's own links to Brown are intimate and complex. What emerges is a film that is at once mysterious, visually and aurally stunning, heart-rending and intellectually rigorous." - Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival 2009

Production format: HDCAM

Selected Screenings:
World Premiere at Berlin International Film Festival 2009
North American Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival 2009
Jihlava International Documentary Festival, Czech Republic 2009
Festival Internacional Del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Havana 2009
Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal 2009