Brigid McCaffrey (USA, 1978)
She is a documentary and experimental filmmaker. Her films have screened at various venues including BAFICI, Bradford International Film Festival, Cinema du Reel, DocLisboa, L’Alternativa, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Torino International Film Festival, Other Cinema in San Francisco and the Los Angeles Filmforum. Her film Castaic Lake was awarded Best Cinematography at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2011. Paradise Springs received the Marian McMahon Award at Images Festival in 2014. She received an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts and a BA in Photography and Film from Bard College.
Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Paradise Springs (2013): The artist’s recent films are set in landscapes that convey precarity and flux. Her experimental approach to documentary focuses on environments and people in transition, and considers these subjects over long periods of time. McCaffrey’s films meditate on the tension between individualism and community in the midst of unstable economic and ecological realities. Shaped by the process of portraiture, the films respond to the physical and emotional changes of their subjects, creating documents that fuse representations of self and place.
Five years of travelling 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 consists of a succession of roving soliloquies and terrain crossings as the wandering geologist describes her interactions with the natural world, while declaring her rejection of land regulation and privatization. The portrait contemplates solitude and the formation of a personal mythology in the face of geologic time.