Laura Kraning
2021Laura's work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Rencontres Internationales, Antimatter Media Art, National Gallery of Art, and REDCAT Theater, among others. She is the recipient of the 2010 Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, Golden Gate Award nomination at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, and Jury Awards at both the 2010 and 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Laura currently resides in Los Angeles, where she teaches in the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts.
Meridian Plain
Laura Kraning, Laura Kraning
In the unique landscape film Meridian Plain hundreds of thousands of photos – from panoramas to macro shots – chart entirely unknown territory. Fabulous editing by Kraning brings the ostensibly dead, semi-desert to life in this short documentary revealing a possible scenario for the future. Meridian Plain is an exciting first-hand report of an expedition into a dusty terra incognita.
Meridian Plain
Vineland
Laura Kraning
A short experimental documentary is filmed at the last drive-in movie theater in Los Angeles, located in a desolate area called the City of Industry. Floating within a backdrop of smokestacks, beacon towers and passing trains, dislocated Hollywood images filled with apocalyptic angst are re-framed and reflected through car windows and mirrors as the displacement of the radio broadcast soundtrack collides with the projections upon and surrounding the multiple screens. In VINELAND, the nocturnal landscape is seen as a border zone aglow with dreamlike illusions revealing overlapping realities at the intersection of nostalgia and alienation.
Vineland
Fracture
Laura Kraning
"Fracture" mines the slips between stillness and motion, as cracks and fissures of bark and stone are spliced and layered, frame by frame, intersecting slices of time. Gathered and assembled over two years, the scarred surfaces of tree limbs and stratified rock collide with slabs of marble and clusters of moss, crystallizing into a flickering mirage of radiating branches and splintered veins of iridescence.
Fracture
PORT NOIR
Laura Kraning
Within the machine landscape of Terminal Island, the textural strata of a 100 year old boat shop provides a glimpse into Los Angeles Harbor’s disappearing past. Often recast as a backdrop for fictional crime dramas, the scenic details of the last boatyard evoke imaginary departures and a hidden world at sea.
PORT NOIR