Sarah J. Christman
2021Her work has screened widely, including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Documentary Fortnight and the Los Angeles Film Forum. She received the New Visions Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival for her debut film Dear Bill Gates and Jury Awards from the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Broad Channel and As Above, So Below.
Christman received her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and her BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Oberlin College.
She teaches in the Film Department of Brooklyn College and the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema / CUNY.
Swarm Season
Sarah J. Christman
Manu Yahna, Alison Yahna
In the shadow of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, a young girl, Manu, and her mother lovingly breed a colony of bees. Meanwhile, as Manu’s activist father protests the construction of a giant telescope on the mountain’s sacred ground, a group of scientists study the landscape in preparation for our inevitable relocation to Mars. Ambitiously linking the earthbound and the cosmic, the intimate and the expansive, director Sarah J. Christman tracks these existentially fraught narratives with an acute attention to time, scale, and historical consequence. As her monumental images gather force, Swarm Season takes on a potent allegorical dimension.
Swarm Season
As Above, So Below
Sarah J. Christman
Jolley Christman, Robin Nagle
For thousands of years, alchemists toiled to synthesize rare substances and universal cures, to manipulate the speed of natural processes. Today, a woman has her husband’s ashes transformed into a memorial diamond. Precious metals are extracted from obsolete electronics. What was once the world’s largest landfill– now also the final resting place of the World Trade Center’s remains– is being converted into a public park. The film intimately examines various transmutations, both microscopic and massive, that reshape matter and its meanings. What separates the permanent from the impermanent, the things we discard from those we preserve?
As Above, So Below
Broad Channel
Sarah J. Christman
Over the course of four seasons, the nuances of everyday activity are examined along one narrow stretch of public shoreline in New York City’s Jamaica Bay. Moments of recurrence and change cycle through an ecosystem rooted in migration.
Broad Channel
Dear Bill Gates
Sarah J. Christman
A simple correspondence evolves into a poetic visual essay exploring the ownership of our visual history and culture. Combining original and archival film, video and images from the internet, Dear Bill Gates draws unexpected connections among mining, memory and Microsoft. Original music by Adam Granduciel.
Dear Bill Gates
