American South

The filmmakers question the conventions of documentation with work that seeks transparency and authenticity outside of the fiction–nonfiction dichotomy.

Unseasonably exposed to fuchsia, / I left that Southern town / knotted to why-what / secrecy. # Like my / first time on a Ferris wheel.

“I didn’t want to paint figuratively. I didn’t want something that was overtly referencing the social issues around me, but I wanted to find a way to describe them. How do you internalize this? How do you make a form that forces a painting to be an experience that is not necessarily easy to see, handle, or look at?”

A painter talks about portraits as love letters, the poetry of country music, addiction and compulsion, drawing out painful archetypes, and finding both resentment and dignity in daily life.

“The reward is getting through the tough stuff. And that’s what’s perplexing about the art thing. When I was going to school there were kids that could draw their asses off. There were kids that were better draftsman than me, for certain. But no one was more determined than me.”

Sarah Gerard’s essay collection, Sunshine State, embodies Florida’s unpredictability in the best sense.
In the spring of 2015, An-My Lê was invited by film director Gary Ross to photograph on the set of Free State of Jones, his period war film inspired by the life of Newton Knight, a Mississippi farmer and Southern Unionist who led an armed revolt against the Confederacy in 1864.

“I think violence is inherited, it’s taught, and some of the characters are born into bad blood. …The characters are raped and so is the land.”