PAST COMMUNITY

Film Diary NYC in collaboration with Baxter St presents: HOME AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN

Film Diary NYC and Baxter St are pleased to present Home as it Should Have Been, a backyard film screening featuring nine films by contemporary image-makers pushing the boundaries of autobiographical filmmaking. The program is loosely themed around home and exile. These films document love, grief, and survival using diaristic modes of experimental filmmaking to uncover personal and political histories. The 76 minute screening will take place on Saturday July 27th at 8pm in our backyard space at 126 Baxter St, New York NY 10013.

Curated by Saint Piñero and Sage Ó Tuama with assistance from Sydney Ellison and Shradha Kochhar.

RSVP HERE!

* ACCESS INFORMATION *

Baxter St’s Backyard is not wheelchair accessible and requires two flights of stairs to get to. Seating (folding chairs) will be available on a first come first serve basis.

Featured Films

Genomic Memory

Shahkeem Williams – USA – 2024 (Work in Progress)- 4’

A meditation on the act of remembering, transference, and maternity. Captured in the northeastern countryside of Jamaica, a mother returns to her native land seeking ancestral guidance for the arduous journey of pregnancy and delivery.

At Home But Not At Home

Suneil Sanzgiri – USA – 2019 – 11’

Sanzgiri’s father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonisers from Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.

May Daze & Early June

Lucky Marvel – USA – 2024 – 6’

A video diary chronicling May 31st – June 7th, 2024. The videotape threads together the sudden closure of UArts, fragments from CCJ’s Community of Images exhibition, a trip to the Mahoning Drive-in, and miscellaneous MiniDV observations distilling personal loss, temporality, and uncertainty among my peers, professors, colleagues, and closest friends.

a la prochaine

Kelee W. Hall, L’au Germain – 2024 – USA – 7’

Through journal entries narrated in Kreyol and French, a la prochaine juxtaposes the chaos of an outside world with the sensual connections unfolding in the intimate space of lovers’ exchange.

Isla Flotante (Floating Island)

Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez – Puerto Rico – 2023 – 5’

Isla flotante (Floating Island) points to Puerto Rico as a place that’s always in motion, shaping a landscape composed of people who are in a directly proportional, waving state of flux. The piece opens with a phone conversation between Roca and their cousin– in which they recall their father’s observation that PR moves a few centimeters every day–by inviting family to imagine and visualize what it would mean to live on a floating island.

Erosion

Devon Narine-Singh – USA – 2024 – 8’

“On the day I leave the city, a valentine to many past lives.” The final installment of Marine-Singh’s Addiction Quartet.

Like a Tongue Knows the Mouth

Laura Ohio – Canada – 2024 – 24’

Time becomes a spiral when a freeway fire causes a city-wide traffic jam, guiding the filmmaker to follow an old woman walking through the rain-drenched streets and bare violence of downtown Los Angeles. In the wake of her father’s death she begins to see herself in stray balloons drifting across pavement, mirror reflections, and a fantasized ghost woman. Ohio uses the camera to grapple with that which moves outside the frame of comprehension—descending into her personal archive to bring back the solitude of being human, the presence of absence, and the inescapable nature of the first home.

Mommy (Chapter 2)

Maggie Lee – 2015 – 3’

Maggie Lee’s Mommy is a documentary about the relationship between a Mother and Daughter before and after death, the shared struggle for love and independence, and a young artist’ coming-of-age. Here is chapter 2, the introduction of Maggie’s character.

Promise Me

Cheryl Mukherji – 2020 – 8’

Promise Me is a collection of live surveillance footage of my mother in our home in India as viewed and recorded on my device in New York between 2018 and 2020. The cameras were installed in our family home to watch over our sick pet five years ago. After our pet passed away, no one removed the cameras and they continued to watch us. I regained control of the surveillance camera to watch my mother, embracing my role as a caregiver to her and resolving my homesickness in a new country. The video is accompanied by spoken word, recordings of conversations with my mother, and songs played, hummed, and sung to each other through a distance of 8500 miles and a time difference of 9 hours between us. Using surveillance as a medium to watch my mother out of concern for her health, I subvert the oppressive nature of surveillance as a medium to track and control marginalized bodies throughout history and contemporary governance, raising questions on privacy, control, intimacy, and the work it takes to stay related to someone, even my mother.