Landscape and cityscape have always played an important role in both commercial and avant-garde cinema. For Peter Hutton place has always been the crucial subject, and during the more than thirty years he has been making films, he has made memorable film art in San Francisco, New York, and Boston; in Budapest, in Iceland, in the Lodz ghetto, along the Hudson River, in Berlin, in Thailand, along the Yangtze River, and most recently in Korea, Bangladesh, and aboard a container ship crossing the Atlantic in late winter. As a filmmaker of landscape and cityscape, Hutton has few peers (and no superiors). En route from the New York Film Festival, Peter Hutton visits the HFA to present his newest film, At Sea (2007), a sweeping meditation on global commerce, labor and geography in the 21st century which chronicles the birth, life and death of a merchant ship. - Scott MacDonald