Being In-Between (30 minutes)
by Jack Akira Sukimoto, MVA 2021
What does it mean to be “in-between”? To live in and out of multiple intersecting, paralleling, and overlapping senses of identity? For many, there is often a feeling of otherness and distance from the communities that make up the backgrounds of their identity due to notions of being unable to look, act, speak, and be who they say they are. Membership in their communities is fraught with challenges and obstacles, pushing and pulling from one misunderstood mix of backgrounds to another. We who live on this borderland between cultures find there is a powerful sense of shared experience and unity in the circumstances that constitute our exclusions. Being In-Between seeks to highlight the threads that connect us along the borderlands of mixed life through the individual experiences of four women—Desiree, Dana, Jessie, and Darlene—all navigating the notions of multi-racial, multi-national, multi-cultural, and multi-linguistic existence. While they may have nothing in common with each other along the lines of race, background, or perhaps even language, they are similar in that they are all women grappling with the complexities of intersectionality, community membership, cultural embodiment, and identity. Metaphorically, and also literally, those within the in-between, as well as the four women in this film, travel through the borderland often as neutral, community-less explorers on a journey both deliberate and accidental.
The Last Lullaby (30 minutes)
by Sophie Dia Pegrum, MVA 2021
Many of us are never ready for death. Western culture associates death with finality and the macabre and most of us ignore the only reliable truth until a last, fearful chapter. With hospitals and the medical field ill equipped to help us face death with equanimity and grace, there is a growing community of professionals and volunteers who advocate for conscious dying, dedicating their time to those facing the threshold. One of these volunteers is Blessing, a death midwife, exquisite singer and proponent for conscious dying. Using a biographical lens, The Last Lullaby is an intensive account of her lived experience chaperoning a group of Californians grappling with their own hopes and fears. The somnolent design and songful incantations demarcate a calm oasis in the chaos of death, a space in our imaginations to envision our ends, make plain our wishes with our loved ones, and converse more openly about death and dying. Could we all live a better life by squarely facing the inevitable fact of our own death?
Makuyeika: Wixaritari in the City (29 minutes)
by Alejandro Perez MVA 2021
Makuyeika: One who roams. The Wixarika are an ethnic group indigenous to the Western Sierra of Mexico. Said to have fled Spanish conquest to seek refuge high in the mountains, the Wixarika—widely but erroneously known as Huichol—through relative isolation have maintained some continuity in their language and religious traditions. Wixarika have very distinct religious beliefs and practices that involve the veneration of corn, deer, and peyote as well as the gods and goddesses that represent the natural elements. Since around the 1960’s, Wixarika arts, crafts, and aesthetics have gained worldwide recognition. A wide demand for their creations has prompted members of this ethnic group to travel out of the mountains to the cities to sell their products, adding a new dimension to their social and cultural dynamics.
OnlyWork (28 minutes)
by Faith Dearborn, MVA 2021
OnlyFans is a subscription based social media service, best known for amateur pornography. In the past five years the platform has paid creators upwards of $2.5 billion and hosts over 70 million users. Stories of massive earnings from the website occupy the public imagination and motivate others to join. As the platform grows, more and more women are drawn to join as creators in hopes of making it big and benefitting financially.
OnlyWork is an ethnographic film centered on the lives of three women who work on OnlyFans. These women are comedians, cosmetologists, marketing executives, mothers, daughters, and friends who work on the platform to supplement their incomes to provide for themselves and their families. Interviews with Meredith, Adrienne and Quinea are interwoven with their digital footprints to illustrate what it means to be a woman working and existing online today.
Photography Collecting: The Still Point of the Turning World
(29 minutes)
by Yiwei Lu, MVA 2021
Fine art photographs, different from journalism or documentary photographs, are created by fine artists and usually displayed at galleries and museums. As the prices of fine art photographs keep breaking records in auction houses, more and more people are paying attention to photographic art. In Los Angeles, there is a rich history and culture of photography collecting.
Photography Collecting: The Still Point of the Turning World is an ethnographic film centered around four serious collectors in Los Angeles who each have their own approaches to and methods of collecting. Interviewing them among their collections and following them to see art, the filmmaker explores why they collect, how they collect and the relationship between their collections and themselves.
Towards Matriarchy (23 minutes)
by Daniel Venegas, MVA 2021
Towards Matriarchy provides a window into the late stage of life as performed by Maria Guadalupe González. A familial ethnographic look into the day-to-day dissonance and harmony she is part of. Set in Hacienda Heights, Southern California in 2021, the film engages with the reality of an elder matriarch who immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico three decades ago. Matriarch(y) not necessarily defined as "woman who rules" but rather as a “female-oriented social form” (Reeves, 2002). The camera (and grandson) follows Lupita between the homes of her two daughters, creating an observational tone deeply rooted in engaged participation.