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Augustinerstraße 1, 1010 Wien
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At a train yard in Cincinnati, Ohio, Nora Sweeney captures an upside-down image with a self-made camera obscura, turning freight trains into slow shooting stars and bringing the sky down to earth. With “Fausto and Emilio”, featuring two elderly brothers in their downtown Cincinnati barbershop, she takes us through a window into an earlier time: turquoise barber chairs, porcelain sinks, vintage postcards from Italy and other memorabilia tell their own stories. Across the country in Southern California, we visit Inez’s chicken yard, migrant workers Jaime, Blanca, and Hugo picking fruit in the orange groves, elderly Armenian men playing games in Maple Park in Glendale, and people from different communities and neighborhoods passing time along the Los Angeles River. Filming alone on a Bolex using 16mm film, Nora Sweeney embraces a certain kind of intimate slowness inherent to both the process and the final form, in which every single image is precious. She may not always share the same language as her protagonists, but they seem to understand and trust each other mutually.
Program
Total running time: 72 min.
All films on 16mm, English or English subtitled
Synopses written by Nora Sweeney
■ SOMETHING LIKE WHALES
US, bw, 5 min., 2013
A portrait of a train yard in Cincinnati, Ohio.
■ FAUSTO AND EMILIO
US, colour, 13 min., 2014
„I like it... because it’s my job.“ Waiting, snipping, shaving, smoking, and chatting. These are the daily rhythms of a barbershop in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio where brothers Fausto (age 83) and Emilio (age 75) have worked together for decades. The barbershop, with its turquoise barber chairs, porcelain sinks, collection of glass bottles of aftershave, vintage postcards from Italy, is more than a workplace – it is a window into an earlier time.
■ PORTRAIT OF INEZ
US, colour, 1 min., 2012
Inez McWright, an 89-year-old African American woman from rural Louisiana, has lived in Val Verde, California since 1956. She approaches aging with nonchalance – working in her garden every day and preferring to stay active rather than dwell on her aches and pains.
■ SWEET ORANGES
US, colour, 18 min., 2014
Heading west from her house, filmmaker Nora Sweeney explores the back roads off of California State Route 126, finding small, historic towns, farms, and railway tracks nestled between mountains and orchards – a landscape that evokes a dream of California’s past. It resembles what migrant workers might have envisioned when traveling west in search of work in the 1930s, a vibrant, fertile promised land. This migration continues. In an orange grove, she meets Jaime, Blanca, and Hugo, a group of orange pickers from Michoacán, Mexico, who share with her their songs, dreams, aspirations, and thoughts about work.
■ BIRDS OF A FEATHER
US, bw, 19 min., 2019
Elderly Armenian men convene daily at a park in Glendale, California to play cards, backgammon, and dominoes. Laughing, singing, arguing – they transform the public space into a portal to their home countries and pass the time together as they age.
■ THE CONCRETE RIVER
US, colour, 16 min., 2023
An exploration of how different communities spend time along the Los Angeles River, a 51 mile waterway largely channelized with concrete that cuts through various neighborhoods of Greater Los Angeles. While people fish, skateboard, paint, play music, have quiet moments to engage with the landscape, or carve out a place to live by the banks, egrets and herons roost in trees growing in the middle of the river. Nora Sweeney was drawn to the river as an unregulated public space where people converge with each other and nature, finding respite from the city.
Biographies
Photo: © Julianna Boehm
Nora Sweeney is a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker, currently teaching at Pierce College. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she received her BA from Oberlin College. She taught documentary filmmaking and photography for two years at a women’s college in Madurai, India through a fellowship from Oberlin Shansi. She then completed her MFA in Film/Video from CalArts, where she taught 16mm film production for eight years. Her work has screened at venues such as the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, REDCAT, Antimatter, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, where her film, “Fausto and Emilio”, won a Juror’s Prize. In 2022, she was a Nature Art Habitat Residency Fellow in Sottochiesa, Italy. In 2024, a retrospective of her films was presented at the Los Angeles Filmforum.