Documentary

Paternal Rites is a first-person essay film that examines the secret underbelly of a contemporary Jewish American family as they grapple with the aftereffects of physical and sexual abuse on their present-day lives. It is also a groundbreaking film about the nature of trauma and memory itself: the ways in which trauma encrypts in uncanny ways; the function of speech and narrative in the process of decryption; and the role of film and filmmaking in the practice of healing.

Over 6,000 gold prospectors invade the reserve of the Nambiquara of Sararé, and loggers raid the mahogany-rich forests, which are threatened by extinction. Pressure on the World Bank (with whom the government of Mato Grosso is negotiating a loan) could end prospecting, but the pillage of the forest continues.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Directed by Vincent Carelli, Maurizio Longobardi, and Virginia Valadão; edited by Tutu Nunes.

My teaching assistant during the spring semester (Marc Rokoff) at the San Francisco Art Institute began shooting a documentary of me and the students making our sci-fi drama, The Planet of the Vamps. Three years later it remained unfinished as he felt inadequate as a documentarian, and so I was offered the box of tapes to edit. I took on the task and the result is a lively record of the production class in action as it tackles the teleplay with a minuscule budget and scanty costuming.

An experimental documentary about the street drag racing scene on Chicago’s near West Side. This is a rambling textured film about obsession. It is about the mythos of speed for its own sake, but it’s also about waiting, and it is through waiting that The BLVD exposes community, inner-city landscapes and nomadic experiences of place. The film treats storytelling as a living medium for determining history. And it commands respect, for those who transform cars, or anything else, through passion.

Using the opening of Godard's film Alphaville as a foundation, Lord constructs a vision of the evolving global city during the last years of the 20th Century. Structured as a series of repetitions, the montage of the changing city is offset by shots of corporate Silicon Valley facades. The result is a dialectical contrast between urban and suburban space, body and mind, chaos and order, and the postmodern and the modern. Shot in Hi-8 video in Tokyo, Fukuoka City, Mexico City, Rome, San Francisco, Naples, and Los Angeles.

You Are What You Are Born For features three blind sisters who sing for their survival on the streets of Campina Grande, Brazil. By providing personal testimony about the intimate details of their everyday experiences, these women bring into question the act of seeing and perceiving. The piece opens with a collage of abstract images, a sequence of rotated landscapes. As viewers, we are subject to what Berliner describes as a, "Vertigo provoked by vision," an alternative vision that invites us to consider how perception affects our identity.

Focusing on the mentorship of Eiko and Koma with the young artists who study and work at the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Cambodian Stories evokes questions of tradition, innovation, and the role of the artist in fostering social change and discoveries of new ways to leap from the canvas to the stage. Eiko & Koma's collaboration hones in on these young painters' collective energy and explores the challenges they face pursuing artistic careers in a country with little opportunity.

My Only Idol is Reality is a video work created from an excerpt of Season One of MTV’s The Real World. The piece uses repetition as a framework for abstraction —  re-recording the video between