My Heart Belongs to Daddy is the third in a trilogy of experimental videos (Mad About the Boy and Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man). This third video uses text, archival movie footage, interviews and fantasy sequences to examine the correlation between the director's relationship with her "real" father and the search for "dyke-daddy." With cameo appearances from Rose Trouche, Robin Vachal, and Exum.
The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity is a documentary about the search for four lost treasures buried on a single farm in Missouri. These treasures include a Spanish explorer's gold, silver from the Civil War, mysterious stone carvings, lost texts, and a wife's attempt to heal her husband and protect herself and her children. Part personal documentary and part historical essay, The Disappointment traces the patterns of cultural forgetting etched in the landscape of the Austin Farm.
Small-town friends watch fuzzy TV, play music, and venture to the video store. Mom bakes a cobbler. The filmmaker fucks his boyfriend in the bedroom above the kitchen.
“The second in a planned trilogy of films about desire and domesticity that began with Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy."
— Projections at NYFF, 2019 catalogue
Tapping into cable because of his lousy reception, Mike gets more than he bargained for as he unwittingly becomes trapped in the medium—the “star” of his own cable TV show. Due to an incomprehensible mishap, Mike’s rewired TV now transmits his image to the world; the observer has become the observed. Turning the tables on viewership in a way that reflects the banality of television, Smith touches on identification with television, and the manner in which television re-presents our world back to us.
A wistful film on the love of homeland.
Video artist Nurit Sharett recounts her childhood memories and converses with her Palestine-born parents who grew up in the British Mandate years. They both took part in realizing the Zionist dream of establishing the State of Israel, a dream now shattered before their eyes.
Subtitled "The Refusenik", "The Zealot", and "The Father", this video takes us on a journey where Germans, Turks, Israelis, Palestinians, fathers, grandmothers, daughters and animals are together for 13 minutes.
Told through the voices of three elderly South Carolinian's who reside in the homes in which they were born, Steven Go Get Me A Switch is an oral history mapping dichotomies of gender, familial mythologies, sexuality, and belief. A heavy use of symbolism comingles with suggestions of narrative proof. The desire to be good and the impossibility of such desire becomes a sharp inaudible pitch, like a dog whistles call to violence.
This surreal, free-form autobiography is concerned with childhood and adult rituals, and the longing for meaning and connection during the often wildly absurd events of early life. Obsessive Becoming returns to Reeves’s early exploration of personal narrative forms, poetry, and his interest in creating a more spontaneous and direct fusion between language and video. Words and images of the expectations and disappointments of coming of age break down the boundaries of both mediums.
"Let Each One Go Where He May is the stunning feature debut of celebrated Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell. Having its world premiere in Toronto, the film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, tracing the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior.
An alcoholic, emaciated father; a grossly obese, tattooed mother; a goofy, hormone-addled brother—all together in a claustrophobic council flat. Welcome to the Billinghams'. Richard Billingham wowed the art scene with his book Ray's A Laugh. Fishtank, his first film, charts the emotional territory of the flat and the family who play out their lives within its confines.
In Home Tape Revised, Benglis took a portable tape recorder with her when she visited her family in Louisiana. She saw most of the experience through the video camera, thus giving her a distance from an emotionally involving situation. The tapes were replayed and re-shot off a monitor and commented about by Benglis... It is a deeply personal tape about an emotionally involving situation, but it is precisely controlled.
A portrait that follows Nan, my uncle who lives with his elderly parents, during the last two years that the three share the same house together. In long, tightly framed shots, a picture emerg-es of three intimately interwoven lives: the gentle and touching bickering between Nan and his mother, the evenings in front of the television when time seems to stand still, and the minutes ticking by as Grandpa silently peels an apple. It is a meditation on time, disabilities, and the economies of care. A warm and at times humorous ode to informal caregiving and the strength of family ties.
This distanced narrative, which approximates a soap opera or a TV interview of bereaved relatives of a victim, confronts two means by which food is used as a weapon: the internalized oppression of self-starvation as a consequence of social learning (anorexia nervosa), and starvation because of poverty and economic domination. In a scenario that merges documentary elements and theatrical acting, an impossibly young couple is addressed by an unseen questioner.
A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
John Killacky is Eiko's long time friend. It was in July 2018 when both of them were attending the tree planting ceremony of their mutual friend Sam Miller at the Jacob's Pillow that Eiko invited John to join her Duet Project. John proposed to create a video work that they both speak to their dead mothers.
After exchanging their writings, the video was shot and edited by Brian Stevenson in the studios of Vermont PBS on November 22, 2019.
Special thanks to Larry Connolly.
All About A Girl is a story of a girl coming to terms with aspects of her own identity and how they relate to the expectations of others. The girl tries to balance the real world that she lives in with the world of her imagination as personified by a dead rat. She appears to have more in common with her small, wild corner of the backyard than the pristine world her mother creates around her.
The artist's mother comments about the status of women while reading a doll house sized book titled Encyclopedia of Famous Women.
An 11-minute tape focused on greenish night-vision textures and certain high-camp performance values, organized around a dysfunctional family "celebrating" several birthdays. We see an elderly woman in apparent dementia staring as her "party" goes on around her, squares of blood-red sheet cake passed around the bedside. Monologue fragments purvey tragic bitchitude, wherein any birthday is a mere occasion for embarrassment and cruelty.
Three insightful and funny vignettes highlighting Segalove's father's quirky traits, habits, and interests.
First Ramon, and then Rufina moved to San Diego County in 1980, unable to raise their family as landless sharecroppers in Mexico. Though uneducated, they manage to work as a landscape contractor and housekeeper, respectively, buy a house, and raise 6 children who complete high school and maintain successful management jobs.
"On my mother’s side there are two lands I come from, separated by the Atlantic ocean, all those fathoms deep. The lands of my grandma and grandpa. I had been through the lands of my grandfather, that is where I still live. The now tamed prairies, missing their bison herds and fenced out into neat geometrical patterns. My grandma comes from a similarly colonized land, Scotland. Ruled by the British Commonwealth and forbidden to speak their language. . . I had never been to Scotland. And I wanted to see my Grandma’s traditional territory.
Company Line is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield, Ohio. The title, Company Line, refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post–war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late 1940’s. The neighborhood was purchased in the early 1970s and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield.
Right after the first Iraq war, the filmmaker visits his family in Iraq. He tries to reconstruct the war from different points of view, all depicted on the same screen at the same time: U.S. airplanes dropping bombs, his parents fixated on the television, and the family welcoming him back.
This title is only available on Radical Closure.
I'm here to bring you the Truth and the Pleasure
Here to show you the meaningful form
It's going to feel like a new kind of leisure
It's going to smell like a freshly mown lawn
I'm installing a personal toolkit for thinking
Especially customized only for you
You enable it just by the action of blinking
From now on your thoughts will be focused and true
