Homegirls: New Work by Chicago Women and Girls

Homegirls: New Work by Chicago Women and Girls

Three of the nine works on this program are by friends, so I’m glad I like them as much as I do. Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far From Home, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s highly personal tribute and invaluable introduction to the seminal filmmaker who worked in Iran and Germany and died last summer in Chicago, mixes clips, commentary, and interviews to create a poetic, bittersweet statement about loss and exile. Vanalyne Green’s Saddle Sores: A Blue Western, about contracting herpes from a Wyoming cowboy, includes many film clips, photographs, printed titles, country-and-western favorites, conversations with friends, and confessions. It’s every bit as jokey and analytical as Green’s earlier video A Spy in the House That Ruth Built, about her sexual attraction to baseball players; but here the narration is much more self-accusing as it explores how she romanticized cowboys and let herself get herpes, and then had to deal with the shame–which makes the relentlessly bantering tone a lot more unsettling and challenging. Ann Marie Fleming’s Tiresias offers a short, hilarious version of Ovid with animated stick figures. I also liked Paula Froehle’s experimental Fever, which interrelates sound, text, and images in original and arresting ways, and Anne Northrup’s narrative And Everything Nice, a psychologically acute portrayal of a little girl’s alienation from her parents at the time of Watergate, exceptionally well acted by Jessica Carleton. Read more