Film Categories: America

  • Babash

    “Babash” is a parrot who speaks mostly Farsi but ­sometimes mixes English and Azeri into his ­conversations. A singular language resulting from the place where he lives: a house in Los Angeles shared with an Iranian family. The same place where Behrouz Rae developed a friendship with Babash over the years. This short film is an associative portrait about a special relationship and the ­domestic surroundings in which it grew. An ­assemblage where household objects, daily movements and playful intimacies are mixed with a dauntless montage, precise sounds and a sensitive gaze. Observing this genuine cross-species friendship between Babash and…

  • Water Fields

    Water Fields is a rhythmic audiovisual composition, taking place in California’s dry landscape.

  • Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

    Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures. Critters Chorus, Cycle 1 is the first part of an ongoing project, developed while delving into unfamiliar habitats. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of…

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Anything Can Happen

    Nighttime. Dogs are barking in the distance. We hear motor sounds and the headlights of a car clicking on and off, and see little sceneries along the road briefly illuminated. An unseen driver connects these momentary landscapes. The headlight beams remain the only light source and actual character throughout the approximately four minutes of rhythmic imagery, in an eerie audiovisual composition. Nothing is incidental, but at any moment “Anything Can Happen”.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • En Memoria

    In a dystopian future, a mother struggles to finish making her daughter’s quinceañera dress.

  • FREE JOAN LITTLE

    Free Joan Little tells the story of the 1975 groundbreaking case of Joan Little (pronounced Jo-Ann), who was one of the first women in U.S history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault. Joan was a Black incarcerated woman in North Carolina who killed her white prison guard who was trying to rape her. Little’s murder trial became an international cause célèbre, uniting fractured social movements—Civil Rights activists, feminists, Black Power advocates, and death penalty opponents—in an unprecedented intersectional coalition that challenged systemic racism and sexism in the criminal justice system.

  • How To Burn A Cross

    A Super 8 experimental film transforms the ritual of cross-burning into a stark meditation on violence, spectacle, and inherited American terror.