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My projects have straddled intersections of the worlds of journalistic reportage, the documentary film industry, narrative, and experimentation with analog, material filmmaking. These works have shown in New York, London, Oslo, Los Angeles, and Montréal.
Eidsvoll
Hybrid, experimental | Development
Writer, Director, Cinematographer, Producer, Editor
Filmed primarily in standard 8mm. Sample footage includes A) a demo
for a narrative short film — currently seeking a producer — and B) a sequence
combining segments of several different experimental moving-image works (in
development). EIDSVOLL aspires to become an immersive, interactive multimedia experience of original and archival portraits of a family, a house, home,
and a self: a blend of oral history, nonlinear narrative, fiction, and experimental
documentary. The project aims to evoke an at times playful, at times melancholic
exploration of materiality and recollection in a cultural moment of p anned obsolescence and digitally-mediated experience and memory. It strives to be sensorial, honest and intimate, tactile and somatic, with unrestricted autobiographical
textures: feminist in nature, privileging the physical and personal.
Unbroken Courage
Documentary | Published
7 minutes | 2020
Writer, Director,
Cinematographer, Editor
A multimedia piece supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, published by the Mekong Review and cross-published by the Pulitzer Center. This story centers around the narrative of Voan Savay, the former prima ballerina of the Khmer Royal Ballet of Cambodia before Phnom Penh was taken by the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975. It is part of broader Pulitzer Center-supported documentary work investigating transnational dynamics of global mental health narratives with an intention to steward alternate perspectives, frameworks and approaches. Journalistic and research literatures paint an overwhelmingly bleak picture of mental health in Cambodia. Psychosocial intervention is a primary component of international humanitarian aid, and Euro-American psychiatry conceptualizes mental health in progressively biological terms with increasingly dominant psychopharmaco- logical intervention. Yet, disconnects between imposed external approaches and local understandings can disrupt communities’ coping strategies that give context-specific meaning to distress. What are local experiences, interpretations, and priorities, and what efforts have been made to harness this expertise? This film takes a holistic perspective to mental health and positions a woman’s lived experience at the fore.
Bioloop
Experimental, archival collage | Postproduction | 14 minutes
Writer, Director, Editor
BIOLOOP is best described as a moving-image
and sound col age of found-footage and audio:
an archival cinematic poem inspired by dominant imagistic and narrative trends in pregnancy
and motherhood content in our contemporary
digital media ecosystem. It is an immersive sonic
and imagistic bombardment, at times humorous,
at times terrifying, at times wondrous: striking
imagery is woven together in poetic abstraction; tempos of an unfolding scenario routinely
punctuated by acute, rhythmic, trance-like
sequences. This historical found-footage piece
allows reflection and evocation of a contemporary moment where a deluge of biomedical
prescriptions and narrow cultural expectations
shape the psychic experience of pregnancy and
early motherhood. The film is a recasting of personal observation and qualitative inquiry from
an interdisciplinary psychiatric research study I
lead. It draws out and emphasizes embodied details of women’s accounts in addition to my own
experiences and impressions. BIOLOOP’s use of
archival material positions the dynamics of our
present in dialogue with historical content from
the ast century. How did we get here? Has society moved beyond the hegemony of heteronor-
mativity? Do women today feel liberated from
narrow expectations around ways-of-seeing and
being, pursuits of perfection? The film attempts
to underscore the underbelly of a neoliberal
environment where fierce competition, optimization, and unrelenting self-surveil ance are nor-
mative practice. This piece has been screened in
small venues before official release in Montréal,
Quebec, London, England, Como, Italy and Oslo,
Norway.
If we feel happiness
Documentary | Postproduction | 27 minutes
Writer, Director,
Cinematographer, Editor, Co-
Producer
Filmed in 2019 during my Pulitzer Center reporting fellowship. Collaboration with Khmer filmmaker, Sansitny Ruth, as co-producer and translator. An impressionistic, intimate, ethnographic film of a vie quotidienne of a family living on the Tonlé Sap river in Cambodia. Reflections and perspectives touching themes ranging from climate change to colonization to globalization to mental distress unfold amidst routines of daily life: moments of banality, delight, and familial affection.
Fingeroni
Experimental | Development
Writer, Director, Cinematorgrapher, Editor
A playful, experimental short film in which a dinosaur, Fingeroni, falls in love with an 8mm ciné Camera. Fingeroni (starring Olivia Norrmén-Smith’s hand) is exploring her surroundings, inquisitively investigating diverse terrain, when she lays eyes on an antique Camera on the other side of the room. Struck by the beauty of Camera, Fingeroni is determined to reach her. She traverses the built environment of the development studio, walking the perilous tightrope of a drying rack and falling into the depths of a bin of discarded footage. As they get closer, Fingeroni and Camera cover the extensive ground of a work table to meet in romantic embrace. Fingeroni looks through Camera’s eyepiece: a rapturous explosion of color, shapes, and textures unlike anything she’s ever seen. This work is inspired by the playful creatures my father created narrated using his hands when I was a child. Fingeroni was my favorite hand dinosaur. This piece is also a love letter to the process of analog filmmaking. *I hand processed all of this footage; Assistant camera by Trevor Blumas
The Spectator
Experimental, Autoethnographic essay film | Completed 2021 | 11 minutes
Writer, Director, Cinematorgrapher, Editor, Actress
I sit in reflection from the solitude of my
bedroom and come to realize that I am not
alone, but in the company of my own image.
The Spectator is an cinematic essay in triptych
that explores my personal reckoning with the
experience-of-self and life mediated by a digital
screen.
Watch... password | thespectator
With and against languishing
Experimental, Autoethnographic | Development | 6 minutes
Writer, Director, Cinematorgrapher, Editor
An impressionistic, auto-ethnographic, film composed of natural sound recordings paired with asynchronous visual imagery
of intimate life in a chapter of COVID-19 pandemic solitude. I
took these recordings of myself in the winter of 2021 over the
course of 14 days of strict quarantine upon my return to an
apartment emptied of my intimate other’s personal effects. This
experimental sonically-driven poetic self-portrait is characterized by sounds of a woman’s solitary existence: connective and
isolating digital communications, her performance-of-self, and
the ordinary yet mystical sounds of everyday life, familiar noises rendered foreign by their clarity, definition, proximity. There
is an evident blurring in this audio composition between the
edges of ‘sounds’ and ‘music’ as if they need not be considered
distinct: the ticking of a toaster timer, the click-clacking pulses
of fingers on a keyboard, notification dings and bloops, opening
of cupboards, gentle touching of small g ass bottles, squishy
application of facial moisturizer, the brushing of hair. Though
nondiagetic sound and image are paired, audio takes center
stage in this film, advancing the arc of the piece. At a time
when contemporary life is characterized by an ever-present
media deluge of imagistic and sonic bombardment and pressure to produce, this media work demands active listening. This
film is an exercise in attending to details, to stranger-than-fiction harmonies across resonances from human and nonhuman
sources. It is an intimate portrait of solitude at a historic moment where the normal connective fabric of relationality and
society was stripped away.