Desamparados (the forsaken) is the name of an abandoned train station in Lima, the origin of a month-long journey to Machu Picchu. By rail and by foot we encounter the ghosts of colonial relics, from Catholicism to industrialism to a lost Incan fortress. We transport between the bucolic, crestfallen mountaintops and dejected mining towns, tracing the scars of conquest upon the terrain. We surge forward despite a forsaken history chiseled into the Andean landscape
Kieu, loosely translated as "foreign,” is the name given to thousands of refugees and their children who have journeyed “home”. We follow the voices of three Viet-Kieu (Vietnamese living abroad) in Vietnam as they navigate the geographic, linguistic, and economic distance between themselves and their "homeland." The camera too becomes a voice in this cinematic journey, the embodiment of a question, a kinesthetic quest for the meaning of being and belonging.
A portrait of life in Immokalee, Florida, the heart of industrial agriculture in the United States and home to its largest population of migrant farm workers. Ultimately, it is a tale of migration, immigration, and the persistent hope for a better life.
An encounter with Ho Chi Minh's personal photographer who recalls secretly traveling the jungles with Ho Chi Minh and, with great emotion, the day that the Vietnamese flag flew from the U.S. embassy.
Real West is an experimental portrait of two roadside ghost towns in South Dakota. It is also the tale of two elderly proprietors who devotedly maintain these sites. Such roadside attractions conjure the mythical West through material and cultural artifacts, from a decrepit wagon wheel to an out-of-tune player piano. Tourists are encouraged to not only experience but also to re-enact these historical environments. The film uses contact microphones and super-8mm film as archaeological tools to uncover the material traces of this living history.
An audio-visual portrait of the Gowanus Canal using binaural contact microphones, a homemade hydrophone, and a last roll of Super-8mm Kodachrome. Since its creation in 1867, the canal’s murky bottom has absorbed over a century of industrial pollutants and raw sewage. Yet the canal retains a unique rustic beauty due to this very toxicity. The film asks us to open our eyes and ears to meet a hidden world submerged within this forgotten and neglected estuary.
A study of three similar but distinct microcultures: the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridge. Interrogated through the use of contact microphones, the physical infrastructures of these bridges become audible and reveal their inherent macroacoustics. The film treats the bridge as an anthropological body for discourse, as a physiology of limbs, organs, eyes, and ears moving in time.
A cross-cultural camera roll of two desolate landscapes. One half shot in the Mojave Desert of Joshua Tree in California, the other half in the industrial ghost town of Industry City in Brooklyn, NY. An in-camera exquisite corpse.
Following the death of her grandmother, Jen takes her grandfather Harvey on one last trip to the Black Hills. Through Super-8mm film, archival photographs, non-synchronous audio recordings, and poetic voiceover, a near-century-old family pilgrimage is unraveled. It is an evocative, lyrical portrait of a granddaughter and grandfather's shared obsession with the American West, one complicated by Jen's mixed-blood heritage, that traces a quest to find a cultural home while evoking the contradictory landscapes of memory, nostalgia, and imagination.
Raul Orlando Perez lives in the mountains of Patagonia. He crafted his first instrument in 1962. He thinks of his work as a sort of re-creation, a form of alchemy, transforming natural materials into living, breathing instruments. A well-crafted instrument is not only defined by the age, treatment, and construction of its materials, but it also continues to grow and adapt with use. In 2009, Kevin T. Allen brought him a door salvaged from his family home lost to fire. He transformed it into a beautiful handcrafted flamenco guitar.
