Brigid McCaffrey

Lay Down Tracks

Brigid McCaffrey, Danielle Lombardi

Following five American travelers, this film journeys though the shifting surroundings of a retired carnival worker, young woman trucker, railroad executive, chimney sweep/surfer, and a nun/riverboat pilot. Each reflects on their work and the worlds they traverse, the fleeting and familiar elements of a life in motion and the delicate contract between desire and necessity.

Castaic Lake

Brigid McCaffrey

Taking its course, the camera drifts in to the coves and surveys the shorelines of a multi-use reservoir to unearth fragments of its young history and consider a series of possible relationships to this artificial environment. Visits are filled with a sense of potentials and the unseen, the lake’s surface separating what is buried and what is to come. Municipal orchestrations, recreational episodes, and small pageants trace this body’s perimeter.

AM/PM

Brigid McCaffrey

Off hours spent wandering a ghost town theme park in the Mojave Desert; a young Sikh man considers his recent relocation.

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder

Fern Silva

Ben Russell, Brigid McCaffrey

Through softly textured 16mm photography and regional iconography, Silva offers a modernist reflection on two of upstate New York’s most storied 19th century touchstones—the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle—nodding to a few musical heroes along the way.

Bad mama, who cares

Brigid McCaffrey

Ren Lallatin

Geologist Ren Lallatin has moved into a small housing complex located between a rail yard and the interstate. Desert vistas are replaced with an arsenal of tactile pursuits, while the situation of the house becomes unstable. Free falling from a fixed point, the perimeter is ornamented for security. Desert winds animate aluminum mobiles and seismic vibrations serenade the home.

Paradise Springs

Brigid McCaffrey

Ren Lallatin

Five years of traveling through and living within the Mojave Desert have instilled in geologist Ren Lallatin intimate relations to its geological formations. She studies the desert, tracing its volcanic and seismic actualities, locates water sources and the relics of previous inhabitants and identifies landscape features that will conceal her mobile shelter from public view. The film follows the geologist as she describes her interactions with the natural world, while declaring her rejection of land regulation and privatization.

Tjúba Tén / The Wet Season

Ben Russell, Brigid McCaffrey

An experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated performances, re-enactments and extemporaneous recordings, this film functions doubly as an examination of a rapidly changing material culture in the present and as a historical document for the future. Whether the resultant record is directed towards its subjects, its temporary residents (filmmakers), or its Western viewers is a question proposed via the combination of long takes, materialist approaches, selective subtitling, and a focus on various forms of cultural labor.