Family

Mom and Dad highlights causal conservations between Phil and his parents around family life, road trips, and camping in an interview-like setting, where his parents sit against a plain brick wall facing the cameras. Phil gives a live-demonstration of the image processor to his parents. His minimalistic approach to processing implies a laid back family time instead of his pursuit of an artful, finished product.

Loss Prevention combines documentary and fiction to tell the story of Irene, arrested at the age of 79 for stealing a bottle of aspirin from a Miami Wal-Mart and sentenced to ten weeks of Senior Citizen Shoplifting Prevention School. Narrated through the voice of her daughter, this film explores the alienation of aging and the evolving relationship between a daughter and an elderly mother.

Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work.

In 50 Blue a young man (the artist’s brother) pushes an elderly disabled man (the artist’s father) in a wheel chair through a muddy landscape. It is a long and exhausting trip to an unknown destination only discovered at the end. After an arduous struggle the two arrive at the edge of a grey lake where a 10-meter high guard tower stands. The young man ties the wheel chair to a rope and hoists the old man up on the tower platform with the help of eight men, all dressed in yellow plastic raincoats.

A mother holds her child. Her face barely shows expression.

The artist's mother comments about the status of women while reading a doll house sized book titled Encyclopedia of Famous Women.

Within the long cycle of initiation ceremonies of the Xavante People, the Wai’a celebration introduces young men to spiritual life and puts them in contact with supernatural forces. Filmmaker Divino Tserewahu speaks with his father (one of the leaders of this ritual) about what can be disclosed of this secret celebration of men, where the initiated go through many trials and tribulations.

Directed by Divino Tserewahú.

In Xavante with English subtitles.

Sixty-five years after the Allied invasion of Southern France, the director's mother, Cecily Barker Finley, tries to recall her involvement as a social worker aboard a WWII Red Cross ship. These memories are recorded in letters and phone calls with her daughter who is living on the coast of France where the invasion occurred. After her mother dies, she discovers a trunk, unopened since the 1940’s in the family garage that is filled with her mother's Red Cross memorabilia. By carefully documenting the trunk's contents, missing pieces of the invasion story begin to come into focus.

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.

Back in the days of hippy bliss, Ulrike and her husband used to believe that the world would be revolutionized by their activities, consisting mainly of smoking pot and having sex. Thanks to a large family fortune, none of them has ever had to work for a living. But the ‘three generation millions’ – one generation makes it, the second maintains it and the third generation blows it – are slowly disappearing. So now the burden of maintaining the tower falls on the children, of whom Sirius (the Latin form of Osiris) actually seems to enjoy making money.

My mother's life and death were both extraordinarily epic. A painter who art therapized herself out of depression. Her resiliency could have rewarded her with a Badge of Courage; alchemizing trauma into art, activism and humor. Modeling these gifts for me, I look at our lives which could have been charted and copied page for page, letter by letter, and I recognize that I have imitated her style, not missing a beat.

— Linda Montano

In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them.  This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles.  Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.

-- Jennifer Montgomery

… A brief summery of what you’ll see : 

A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Focusing on Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, musician Derrick Green –– the filmmaker’s brother and lead singer of Brazilian band Sepultura –– and her own work produced in Lisbon since 1992, Come Closer can be thought as a meditation on friendship and saudade.