Editor
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Thanks
At the end of 2020 I drove from Denver, Colorado to Philadelphia, PA with my father Ben. As we drove east, tracing a path that reversed the historical trajectory of westward expansion, we spoke about decolonization, climate change, and what we imagined might be next for our world.
Editor
& so Lunar New Year is a durational effort, a sequence of 4 digital, 13 analog vertically oriented portraits, all made handheld with found and available light, presented in order of exposures taken. The series (swallows hard, accepts its truth) is a record in collaboration with those that allowed me to be in space with them, creating quiet encounters in the polyphonic city. Not all is pictured, not all are pictured, just what & who was made available through any number of very specific & amorphous conditions & agreements on this day. A study of the transformative power of light moving through space, & a sincere awe in the ability to render that still, & (as the Meshell Ndegeocello song says) yet it moves, offering the cinema of the everyday, offering description as narrative, operating in the multisensory—text, image, voice, my primary mediums, previously presented in the book, now in cinema, still the book: all efforts in dedicated sequencing.
