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
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
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
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 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.