Reviews
“A mesmerizing experience. Far from an exploitative voyage into an antiquated existence, what emerges is an empathetic step into the pace of everyday life in this corner of America, coloured by music.”
— Matt Krefting
"Exquisite...each shot so absorbing, I watched the whole thing with a kind of suspense."
— John Jeremiah Sullivan
“...a gentle and conscientious ethnography that borders on both home movie and art film...It presents a graceful portrait of a couple whose lives are, above all, oriented toward each other...This depiction of being-with-each-other is not romanticized, yet it permeates the film."
— Sander Hölsgens
“The film’s power derives from the same thing that made the first moving pictures so mesmerizing: the spectacle of life passing before your eyes, in all its tedium and strangeness, including the strangeness of life drawing to its end.”
— Peter Trachtenberg
“The film is like an answer song to a folk revival classic: John Cohen’s “High Lonesome Sound,” from 1963. [...] Linefork is a different kind of documentation, however. Co-produced by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, it is highly conscious of its own complications as a work of observational anthropology [...] And it makes brilliant use of that self-consciousness by giving its subjects time and space to speak for themselves.”
— Damon Krukowski
“Rawlings and Silva bring something crucial to the fore, namely the idea that there is not one time, but several times. Linefork is a river that moves at different speeds and into different directions. It takes small turns, speeds up, then slows down again at another corner. [...] Not all films show this progression of time as clearly as Linefork....it’s a great example of slow film”
— Nadin Mai
“a descriptive collage of a musical genius[...] this revered master of Appalachian bluegrass drop-thumb banjo casts a spine-tingling spell sure to delight.”
— Carol Holzberg
“...a slice-of-life film about a man whose life has been shaped by the music of the mountains.”
— John Curtis Goad