TROUBLE AT BAM IN NYC (FEB 19) and Other News

Dear Friends,

I’m so excited to come to New York in February with Trouble! It was named in The New Yorker this week!! And YES I’m coming to town for it! So I hope to see you there.

FEB 19 NEW YORK

Trouble will be screening Brooklyn Academy of Music (click for tickets). It is part of a series called True To Life curated by Triple Canopy. (More info here). I’ll be there in person!

THE NEW YORKER

This screening is featured in Goings On About Town in The New Yorker this week!

MIMESIS MAGAZINE

An interview I did a while ago is out now on Mimesis

Lastly, I have something upcoming at a major LA institution this spring/summer so stay tuned for that (it’s not announced yet).

TROUBLE SCREENINGS Jan/Feb 2021

REDCAT Jan 25 8pm PST

Trouble is opening REDCAT’s Spring Season! Followed by a live Q+A.

Tickets available here

Available in the US only.


Document Film Festival Jan 25-31

Trouble will be streaming for the duration of the festival with a Live Q+A on January 27 at 7:30pm GMT.

Tickets available here

Available in the UK only.


QueerTactics Austrian Premiere Jan 31

This is an IN PERSON screening (which I will not be at because American’s aren’t allowed to go to Austria) at the Admiralkino in Vienna.

Tickets available here

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TROUBLE SCREENINGS ONLINE!

Last week I screened Trouble on the Commonwealth + Council site and it got 400 views in 2 days! If you missed the free screenings, or wanted a friend to see it, there are a few places starting next week Trouble can be viewed for a small fee. Tell your friends!

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May 22-29

Trouble will be streaming at the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast.

Tickets are on pre-order now for £2.99 (or more if you want to make a donation), and the first 50 purchases will be accompanied by a discount code for Trouble: The Book, a limited edition (200) publication that accompanies the film. Texts by the brilliant Eoin Dara and William J Simmons!

*These screenings are available in all regions EXCEPT Canada.

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May 28 - june 24

Trouble's Canadian premiere is at this year's Hot Docs film festival (which has moved online). Tickets on pre-order from May 26.

Trouble begins in Vienna, with the filmmaker meeting her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two years old. She surprises him by showing him a BBC documentary that was made in 1971 about his teenage interfaith romance with a Catholic girl. They are cast as star-crossed lovers in a portrayal riddled with inaccuracies that led to threats of violence from both sides and his eventual flight from Ireland. After it aired, he cut all ties with friends and family and has never returned. The film then travels to Northern Ireland and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years in Belfast. In David’s absence, Garnett uses previously recorded audio interviews to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the youthful presence of her father and casts a transgender actress, Robyn Reihill, in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of cinema as a container for "Truth." In Trouble, it is a means of connection between an estranged parent and his adult child, a medium for drawing connections between political struggles and a way to highlight the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.

*** Please consider buying a ticket even if you saw the free screening and liked the film! It will go a long way towards supporting both the film and the arthouse cinema venues that are struggling to keep their doors open in this crisis. Thanks for your support and hope you're all safe out there!!

UPCOMING SCREENINGS AND SHOWS

Dear Friends,

I have a lot coming up this Spring! Here are some things going on between now and mid-march. Follow my Instagram and Facebook for more up to date updates! I hope to see you and/or your friends at some of this stuff!

MARCH 5 CHICAGO

CONVERSATIONS AT THE EDGE AT SAIC

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In the early 1970s, Mariah Garnett’s father fled Northern Ireland after being the subject of a BBC documentary about relationships that crossed the country’s violent religious and political divide. Four decades later, the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker returned to her father’s native Belfast, immersing herself in the city’s sectarian upheavals to make her own film about his early life. Named one of Sight & Sound’s best films of 2019, Trouble mixes archival footage, contemporary interviews, and a series of extraordinary performances in which Garnett plays her father, reenacting both the BBC documentary and his present-day reflections on the period. Through its multifaceted form, the film depicts the complexities of identity and the echoing effects of personal and historical trauma.

2019, United Kingdom/United States, DCP, 83 minutes followed by discussion.

Mariah Garnett in person

MARCH 11 + 12 AMHERST, MA

SELECTED VIDEOS: AN EXHIBITION BY MARIAH GARNETT

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SCREENING OF TROUBLE MARCH 11, TALK & OPENING MARCH 12

March 2, 2020 - 10:00 am to March 27, 2020 - 12:00 pm

Fayerweather Hall, 105 - Eli Marsh Gallery

"Selected Video Works" presents four videos by Mariah Garnett made between 2010 and 2014. These works represent the early cornerstones of her experimental documentary practice. In all four films, the relationship between subject and filmmaker is foregrounded, calling into question the power dynamics at play in representational art practices. "Garbage, The City, And Death" uses a Fassbinder text to reframe a real-life relationship between long-lost siblings as a romantic rivalry. It was Garnett's first attempt to mix theatricality with a real relationship between herself and her subject. "Picaresques" takes its inspiration from "Lieutenant Nun", the autobiography of a transgender conquistador at the turn of the 17th century as its inspiration and abruptly becomes a portrait of Garnett's own friendship with a nine-year-old tomboy from Santa Monica. It is an attempt to look to the past and future for heroes of a similar gender to the artist's own. "Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin" moves through phases of idolization, anxiety ending in a touchdown in reality in a conversation between the artist and Berlin himself. This is the first film in which Garnett used impersonation as a strategy for representing her subject. Finally, "Full Burn" marks a shift in Garnett's practice away from overtly queer themes to the geopolitical. It is a portrait of four US War Veterans who have continued to use their own physicality to earn a living, three as stunt men and one as a massage therapist. It is a meditation on masculine duty, trauma and re-enactment.

March 20 - Glasgow, uk

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March 20, 9pm,

Glasgow International Short Film Festival

Fifty-two years since the commencement of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Barbed Wire Love presents intimate tales from those who stayed, those who left and those who passed through. Sisters and brothers, those who danced at raves, those who had good intentions and those who did not. Chance encounters, intimate first-person cinema and the unreliability of history and biography create space for wry humour and tiny ecstasies.

With clear glimpses into, around and beyond violences proximal and peripheral to the North of Ireland, these are films which begin to describe a contested place and its social politics. Crossing genders, cruising lock-ins; moving from Tyrone to Vienna to Derry to Los Angeles and returning home to the cul-de-sacs of Eden, Barbed Wire Love creates new possibilities for connection.

Opening film Trouble begins in Vienna, when filmmaker Mariah Garnett meets her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since since the age of 2. Their faltering relationship leads us on an odyssey tracing a radical civil rights centered politics and nuance that has long since fallen out of media accounts and representations of Northern Ireland. Connecting with David through reenactments of the BBC news feature that drove him out of town, Garnett queers history and makes it new again.

Screened at BFI London and New York Film Festivals during the last few months of 2019, Barbed Wire Love’s opening feature offers an opportunity to get up close with a film that the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine crowned “one of the year’s best documentaries”. 

Curated by Myrid Carten and Peter Taylor. We are delighted that Mariah Garnett will attend to introduce the screening.

March 22 - COPENHAGEN, DK

March 22, 8pm,

TROUBLE’S INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

CPH:DOX NEXT:WAVE COMPETITION

MAR 22: 8PM CHARLOTTENBORG SOCIAL CINEMA - PREMIERE W/ YOURS TRULY IN CONVERSATIONMAR 24: 11:30AM CINEMATAKET CARLMAR 26: 6:15PM CINEMATAKET BENJAMINA northern Irish Romeo & Juliet story from the troubled 1970s, reconstructed with a female artis…

MAR 22: 8PM CHARLOTTENBORG SOCIAL CINEMA - PREMIERE W/ YOURS TRULY IN CONVERSATION

MAR 24: 11:30AM CINEMATAKET CARL

MAR 26: 6:15PM CINEMATAKET BENJAMIN

A northern Irish Romeo & Juliet story from the troubled 1970s, reconstructed with a female artist playing the role of her own father.

As her Irish father doesn't want to take part in her films, the artist Mariah Garnett must appear in his place. She cuts her hair, dresses like a man and lip synchs her interviews with him in the places in Belfast where she reconstructs scenes from their shared life, in order to understand him – and herself. Her father was a ragged young Protestant with messy hair and a cotton coat in the troubled 70s, when the conflict with the Catholics was still bitter and bloody. Like a Northern Irish Romeo with his Catholic girlfriend Maura as his Julie, her father was involved in the old conflict in more ways than one, and this has completely unpredictable consequences in an equally unpredictable film, which blends archive footage from a proud and wrecked Belfast with androgynous re-enactments. 'Trouble' is a film with three main characters: the teenager, who tries to find his identity in the Northern Irish civil rights movement. The young woman who tries to understand her father. And last, but not least, Belfast itself in all its poverty and rich history.

Solo Show: Selected Video Works at Amherst College

Selected Video Works: An Exhibition by Mariah Garnett

March 2, 2020 - 10:00 am to March 27, 2020 - 12:00 pm Fayerweather Hall, 105 - Eli Marsh Gallery

"Selected Video Works" presents four videos by Mariah Garnett made between 2010 and 2014. These works represent the early cornerstones of her experimental documentary practice. In all four films, the relationship between subject and filmmaker is foregrounded, calling into question the power dynamics at play in representational art practices. "Garbage, The City, And Death" uses a Fassbinder text to reframe a real-life relationship between long-lost siblings as a romantic rivalry. It was Garnett's first attempt to mix theatricality with a real relationship between herself and her subject. "Picaresques" takes its inspiration from "Lieutenant Nun", the autobiography of a transgender conquistador at the turn of the 17th century as its inspiration and abruptly becomes a portrait of Garnett's own friendship with a nine-year-old tomboy from Santa Monica. It is an attempt to look to the past and future for heroes of a similar gender to the artist's own. "Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin" moves through phases of idolization, anxiety ending in a touchdown in reality in a conversation between the artist and Berlin himself. This is the first film in which Garnett used impersonation as a strategy for representing her subject. Finally, "Full Burn" marks a shift in Garnett's practice away from overtly queer themes to the geopolitical. It is a portrait of four US War Veterans who have continued to use their own physicality to earn a living, three as stunt men and one as a massage therapist. It is a meditation on masculine duty, trauma and re-enactment.

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BREAKING CODES in BALTIMORE

MARIAH GARNETT: DOCUMENTARY APPROPRIATION FICTION

One Night Only Friday, February 21

Kicking off our Breaking Codes series of emerging artists and emerging forms is Los Angeles based filmmaker and performer Mariah Garnett. Garnett blends documentary, narrative and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Using source material that ranges from found text to iconic gay porn stars, Garnett often inserts herself into the films, creating cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity. In addition to screening her work, Mariah will be conducting a free workshop on Saturday, February 22 from 10:30am-1:30pm.

Ticket Prices

$11 regular admission
$9 matinees (before 6pm)
$9 students/seniors/active military with valid ID
$8 MdFF MembersProgram Notes

Directions to the Parkway Theatre

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway is located at 5 W. North Avenue (at the intersection of North Avenue and Charles St.) in Baltimore's Station North Arts and Entertainment District

See the Parkway on Google Maps

TROUBLE at UCLA Graduate Studios

Did you miss Trouble when it was in LA Last year? It’ll be screening at the UCLA Graduate studios, Feb 7th, 7:30pm at 8535 Warner Dr, Culver City, CA 90232.

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Trouble (book) for sale!

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Visit the new STORE page to pick one up! Also film stills and prints for sale through the New Museum.

TROUBLE
Artist book LE 200
9” x 12”
text by Eoin Dara, William J. Simmons
images by Mariah Garnett
book design by MJ Balvanera
printed by Typecraft

$20 USD

buy now!

 

Screening at USC: Thursday, Feb 28

Two of my films will be screening at USC’s Cinematheque 108 curated by Madison Brookshire on Thurs, Feb 28 along with a bunch of other great LA artists!

https://cinema.usc.edu/events/event.cfm?id=43169

The Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108
George Lucas Building, USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
900 W. 34th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVPs REQUIRED.
 

About the Films

  • Mariah Garnett, Open Letter, 2016, 9 min.

  • Kate Brown, Not Fade Away, 2004/18, 9 min.

  • Brenda Contreras, Corpse, 5 min.

  • Mariah Garnett, Untitled (Eclipse), 10 min.

  • dana washington, UNDER BONE, 5 min., Liberated Zones, 11 min.

  • Brenda Contreras, La Lucha Sigue: Marichuy in Mexico City, 2018, 5 min.

  • Chloe Reyes, New Sun Breathing In, 2017, 6 min., Fly Trap, 2014, 4 min.

  • Dicky Bahto, So You Don't Forget Your Name, 2019, 8 min., But, Does She Like It? 3 min.

About Madison Brookshire


Madison Brookshire is an artist and filmmaker whose work crosses experimental film, music, painting, and performance. His work has shown at REDCAT, MOCA, the Toronto International Film Festival, DokuFest, Union Docs, the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Bradford International Film Festival, Migrating Forms, Exploratorium, Los Angeles Filmforum, Echo Park Film Center, the Hammer Museum, and Artists Television Access. He has had solo exhibitions at Parker Jones, Culver City; and Presents Gallery, Brooklyn; and has been in group shows at the Torrance Art Museum; Gallery 400, Chicago; and Heliopolis, Brooklyn. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Art Department at UC Riverside.

Check-In & Reservations


This screening is free of charge and open to the public Please bring a valid USC ID or print out of your reservation confirmation, which will automatically be sent to your e-mail account upon successfully making an RSVP through this website. Doors will open at 6:30 P.M.

All SCA screenings are OVERBOOKED to ensure seating capacity in the theater, therefore seating is not guaranteed based on RSVPs. The RSVP list will be checked in on a first-come, first-served basis until the theater is full. Once the theater has reached capacity, we will no longer be able to admit guests, regardless of RSVP status.

Parking


The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located at 900 W. 34th St., Los Angeles, CA 90007. Parking passes may be purchased for $12.00 at the USC Royal Street Entrance, located at the intersection of W. Jefferson Blvd. & Royal Street. We recommend the USC Royal Street Structure, at the far end of 34th Street. Limited street parking is also available along Jefferson Blvd.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Name: David James
Email: djames@usc.edu