The film focuses on the social ecology of Highway 59, the road to the Beaconia Research Station in Manitoba. It was shot on Super 8 film on a rainy day in late August, and the 'script' flew out of the truck on the third shot, but it didn't seem to matter. The soundtrack is by The Wilderness of Manitoba, a band that was inspired in part by The Wildflowers of Manitoba, an installation that was also shot at the Beaconia Research Station by Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob. The colour bars in the movie are from Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov's Colour Bar Research Project. The title comes from a 14th century satirical French novel about a shipwrecked explorer who stumbles upon a lost island civilization.