Melissa Friedling

Pop culture and land-use practices converge in Brooklyn, NY where a Bangladeshi immigrant family recall the found film that formed the overhead lattice support for their urban garden - before it was leveled to make a parking space for the father's livery car.

This is a hand-processed camera roll shot around occupied Zuccotti Park in September, 2011. An observation of direct democracy and DIY tactics activating a link to history and spectacles of mass demonstration from earlier eras.

An exploration of the site of the first purpose-built modern film studio in the US (American Vitagraph Company) which operated from 1907 through the silent era, was repurposed into a yeshiva school for girls in the early 1980s, and rebuilt in 2000s for residential use with the original 70-foot smokestack still intact. The film includes interviews with film historians and descendants of the studio founders; re-photographed nitrate fragments of films that were produced at the Brooklyn studios over 100 years ago; and original footage shot inside the yeshiva school and of the building during and after demolition. The film explores both profound resistances and persistent echoes of national and local cultural histories, the archeology of the American film industry, local neighborhood demographics, gentrification, and politics.

Exploring (odd)kinships spawned in assisted reproductive technologies, the film tracks parallel inquiries into the origin of a fugitive pair of birds alongside a personal study of human fertility, twinning, and reproductive justice.