Conversations at the Edge: Current Schedule

1966–2011, Multiple directors, USA, 35mm and 16mm, ca. 60 minutes + discussion
Laida Lertxundi in person!

Shot within and around Los Angeles, Laida Lertxundi’s seductively enigmatic films mix soul music and art punk as non-actors lounge within sublime beachscapes, cheap motels, and light-flooded apartments. Sequences repeat and mirror one another to evoke half-memories and walking dreams. My Tears Are Dry (2009) is a luscious and melodic composition that lures the viewer into and out of a warm afternoon nap. Outmoded technologies like boomboxes and SD video monitors become compositional props set amidst breathtaking landscapes in Cry When It Happens/Llora Cuando Te Pase (2010), and Footnotes to a House of Love (2007) intimately captures the quotidian activities that fill and surround a dilapidated desert house. For this program, Lertxundi weaves together her own pieces with films that have influenced her practice, including work by Hollis Frampton, Bruce Baillie, and Morgan Fisher.

Laida Lertxundi's (b. 1981, Bilbao, Spain) work has shown at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, MoMA, LACMA, Viennale, “Views from the Avant Garde” at the New York Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was named in CinemaScope’s “Best of the Decade” reviews and as one of the “25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century” in Film Comment’s Avant-Garde Poll. She is a film and video programmer in the United States and Spain, and has published various articles on film, most recently in the anthology La risa oblicua and Bostezo magazine. She teaches film at the University of California San Diego and lives in Los Angeles, California.