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Songbook (55min, 4k video, 2025) is the culmination of a body of work Garnett began in 2020 working with an archive belonging to her great-great aunt, Ruth Deyo, who was a composer and spiritualist who moved to Egypt in 1924 and lived there until her death in 1960. While she was there, she began hearing voices and transcribed all her spirit communications into diaries. She also worked with this spirit to score a grand opera about the lives of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen which was never produced. In reconsidering this archive and body of work, Garnett formed relationships with both classically trained opera singers (Breanna Sinclairé and Chris Craig) and experimental musicians (Holland Andrews and Nancy Mounir) and began working with a Jordanian playwright, Raphaël Khouri, to write a new libretto to set to Ruth's original music. The film documents the process of working through this material on multiple levels with this group of artists, weaving together resonant diary entries of Ruths with interviews with key collaborators and diaristic text from a research trip Garnett took to Cairo in 2021. In a move away from the colonial underpinnings of Ruth’s original project, what emerges in the film is a picture of artistic collaboration, creative obsession, the spirit world, chosen family and sustaining all of the above at the margins.
It was exhibited as part of the 2024 COLA IMAP show in Los Angeles and its festival premiere is at CPH:DOX, 2025.
Link to “Counter Epic” by Lauren Mackler (catalog essay for the COLA show).