Chicago-based filmmaker and critical theorist Domietta Torlasco captures what life looks like in unseen places. In these three video essays, Torlasco layers personal interviews, archival footage, and silent portraits to document experiences of entrapment and endurance. Presented in partnership with the Program in Moving Image Studies (MIMS) and the Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature department at the University of Minnesota.
Join the filmmaker after the screening for a Q&A.
Philosophy in the Kitchen
Gleaning, collecting, and reframing images of domestic labor from key European films, Philosophy in the Kitchen sketches an alternative history of the cinema in which the blurring of work and life gives rise to a new image and thought of time. 2014, 21 minutes.
House Arrest
Documenting a visit to the Stasi Museum, Berlin, in the summer of 2013, a few weeks after the leak of classified NSA documents, Torlasco mixes shots of the museum’s homelike curtained windows and mundane office furnishings with glimpses of the American West. 2015, 8 minutes.
Sunken Gardens
An old roadside motel in Florida is revealed to be a prison for people in debt—the unemployed, the working poor, and the disenfranchised middle class. Part documentary, part fictional scenario, Sunken Gardens juxtaposes disparate materials—silent portraits, personal interviews, staged readings—to glimpse how lives are led in unseen quarters of our economic and justice systems. 2016, 19 minutes.
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