The Suburban Trilogy2011

A feature length project about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post WWII North American suburbs and between the war Europe, critically seem through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation. - A rambunctious embrace, body to body, woman to woman, entrance to exist - in-laws foregrounding the construction of cinematic meaning, the elusive nature of memory and desire, the hysteric familial area of the social. The project is prismatic, in that each part explores a different perspective in terms of both cinematics and historical era.

DVD INCLUDES:
Cake and Steak USA, 2004, 21 min. Constructed as a series of achronological 'chapters' in which Edenic images of adolescent twirlers, basement parties, and 'dress-up' are challenged by a sound montage composed of horror movie music, old TV shoes, laugh tracks, and machine noise of our modern Arcadias.

The Future is Behind You USA, 2004, 20 min. A fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive of 1930's Europe with two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under the shadow of oncoming history. At once biography & fiction, history & psychology. The Future is Behind You excavates gestures to get at the hears of narratives; it seeks a bridge between private & public histories. Music by John Zorn, arranged and performed for the movie by Sylvia Courvoisier and Mark Feldman.

Surf and Turf USA. 2008-11, 32 min. Contemporary ambiguities on the Jersey shore: the look is secular, the lifestyle capitalist, the religion orthodox. 40,000 Syrian Jews have moved into landscape previously occupied by Irish, Italian and the quite different sect of Askenazi Jews. The "unmelted pot" of America's small towns is set within memory and contemporary oppositions. What does it mean to have class in America? What does it mean to be Jewish? I think of conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Serbia and Bosnia, India and Pakistan: neighboring families and races split apart by religion. Extreme poverty enforces the tribal, while extreme wealth maintains it. Surf and Turf provides no easy answers but raises issues that have to long stayed behind closed doors: what do we say when we think no one is listening?