Directing
Maintenance is filmmaker Adele Horne’s exploration and meditation on house cleaning. Cleaning is one of the most private things we do in our homes, other than sex and arguments. We often feel shameful about clutter and dirt, so there is something particularly intimate and meticulous about the act of cleaning it up. Although a clean home is socially valued, the work required to achieve it is not. House cleaning exists on the shadow side of the economy, on the margins or outside of paid employment. It is an additional, uncounted form of labour that enables our roles as paid workers and consumers. This film invites viewers to meditate on the ongoing maintenance work that makes other, more highly valued labour possible.
Global Recordings Network, a Christian organization, has recorded Bible stories in over 5,500 of the world's 8,000-plus languages. GRN's use of inventive, ultra-low technology makes it possible for these people - many of whom live in the most remote corners of the world - to hear The Good News for the first time in their lives. - Written by ldavis-2
In Common observes the life of a garden planted on a "vacant lot" in Los Angeles. As the days and seasons cycle through a year, different tempos of life exist in counterpoint. The gardener's rhythm of work, as she grows and harvests food, accompanies the scurrying of small creatures in the garden, the play of weather and light on the hillside, and the hurtling of cars across the city on the freeway below.
On the 13th of each month, hundreds of people gather at a site in the Mojave Desert to see visions of the Virgin Mary appear in the sun. They point Polaroid, cell phone, and video cameras at the sun, and compare interpretations of the resulting images. This film documents the creative energy of this populist spiritual event.
A group works together to build a cottage out of inexpensive local resources in Northern California. The film documents the gestures and materials that are part of the process.
When sunlight falls through the spaces between leaves on a tree, the pin-hole apertures in the foliage create images of the sun on the ground below. This film records replicas of the sun as they appear and disappear in the dappled light under trees.
Surrounded as we are by the proliferation of photographic images, we sometimes confuse these images with the actual, embodied experience of seeing. In reality, only a small central portion of human vision is sharp like a photograph. Peripheral vision is blurry and indistinct, the realm of intuition. In a series of short, playful experiments, this film explores what can be seen from the corner of the eye, perversely pushing at the central rectangle of the film frame to see how far it can stretch to suggest what lies beyond it.
