Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

Like a generation of viewers, filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery was profoundly affected by the film Deliverance. In an attempt to both counteract and explore the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey’s story, Montgomery set out to re-create the film using an all female cast of experimental filmmakers who work in the academic field: Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, Meredith Root and Montgomery, herself. While faithful to their respective male characters, these women also bring their real life selves to their fictional roles, creating a series of interesting filters of similarity and difference that inevitably lead towards provocative questions on issues of gender and power.

Deliver is a unique experiment in the role gender plays in our interpretation and experience of narrative cinema as it inverts some of the most iconic features of this well known film. Unlike the Deep South setting of Deliverance, Deliver takes place in the Catskill Mountains with the group of women canoeing down a river called – believe it or not – the Beaverkill. In the original film, the iconic male hillbillies’ hostility towards the bourgeois men is based largely on the issue of land entitlement. Few women can claim that history of entitlement and the Catskills are not hillbilly country. What then motivates the story’s notorious rape scene in this remake? At what point do we read it as an unconvincing imitation of a “real” rape? The lines between bathos and pathos become dangerously blurred as Deliver aims to pose critical questions about the gendering of nature, homosocial sexual violence and the act of filmmaking itself.