Film / Discussion
Worlds of Homelessness:
Long Story Short

Wed, 10/23/2019
4:00 PM NAVEL

Presented within the context of WORLDS OF HOMELESSNESS: DAY 2

USA, 2016, 45 minutes, in English
Director/Producer/Editor: Natalie Bookchin, Sound Designer: Michael Kowalski.  

In the moving and immersive film LONG STORY SHORT, over 100 people at homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs, and job training centers in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in Northern California discuss their experiences of poverty: why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done about American poverty and homelessness today. Numerous interviews are stitched together to form a polyphonic account of American poverty told from the inside.

MacArthur Grantee Natalie Bookchin, an artist whose work has been shown at the Pompidou Centre, the Whitney Museum and the Tate, uses the film to amplify the voices of the displaced and dispossessed. While individuals whom Bookchin filmed in separate spaces appear onscreen in their own visual spaces, mirroring the isolation of their experiences, words flow between them like a musical ensemble. Together in the film for the first time, Americans who are rarely acknowledged or listened to form a virtual collective.
(Source: Icarus Films)

 

Natalie Bookchin is an artist whose work explores some of the far‐reaching consequences of the digital on a range of spheres including aesthetics, labor, leisure, and political speech. Her media works have received national and international acclaim and are exhibited and screened widely, including at LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time.
.Bookchin was on the faculty of the Photography & Media Program at CalArts in Los Angeles from 1998–2015, chair and co-chair of the program for seven years. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is a professor of Media and Associate Chair in the Visual Arts Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.