Karl Precoda

During the era of hyper-formulated pop music in the early 1980s, The Dream Syndicate emerged from Los Angeles as a sensation with their gritty, guitar-driven sound that relied heavily on feedback. How Did We Find Ourselves Here? chronicles the band's journey from their early beginnings, through conflicts with former friends, battles with major record labels, and disbandment, to their eventual reunion in 2012. Despite never achieving widespread commercial success, the band maintains a devoted fanbase and commands great respect from musicians around the globe for their significant influence.

SUNDOWN is excerpted from a transdisciplinary “slow ethnography” project on race and travel in the American South. Deploying the 360 degree camera, but resisting the trend toward what Bazin called the “myth of total cinema,” SUNDOWN elects not to reconcile the dual 180 degree image streams into an illusion of continuity that, to the filmmakers, appears as artificial as the furious “Russian cutting” of Eisenstein and the early Soviets, or the “suturing” of spectators into the comforting illusions of bourgeois realism typical of classic Hollywood. Instead, SUNDOWN offers a properly alienated cross-section of an evening in New Castle, Virginia, a town described on Wikipedia as “100% white,” where not long ago travelers of color might have been urged to move on as quickly as possible.