A SHAPE OF ERROR
An experimental l6mm feature, A Shape of Error is based on the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley— writers whose lives forecast the modern in their concern for women, free love and labor.
THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY
A feature-length project about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post World War II North American suburbs and between the war Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation. Includes CAKE + STEAK, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU, SURF + TURF.
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RIDING THE TIGER: Songs from Capitalist China.
An intimate, critical, both sympathetic and terrifying look at China today, positions a reflexive and personal voiceover to interrogate its images, deepening our view of the ambiguities of this post-Communist moment.
SURF AND TURF
For six years, Abigail Child focused the camera on the community of her mother and herself in the Syrian Arabic-Jewish (Sephardic) community of Deal, New Jersey. Virtuoso edited glimpse of a complex 'unmelted pot' with strong bonds yet also frightening and sharp sides.
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(IF I CAN SING A SONG ABOUT) LIGATURES
To explore relations of text and image, how text turns the image. In (If I Can Sing A Song About) Ligatures, words taken from lines of Nada Gordon’s unrequited love poems, whose vocabulary is taken, in their turn, from anonymous web poems, reveal a history of sexuality.
On The Downlow
An intimate portrait of four men negotiating their bisexual desire within the African-American community of Cleveland, Ohio. In the process of revealing the lives of men who self-describe themselves as “dipping on both sides of the fence,” the film showcases the complex intersections of sexuality, race, class and family in contemporary middle America.
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THE PARTY
“In The Party, Child has assembled a remarkable array of subjects embodying the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and class. The film documents a party of African-American men in Cleveland, living "on the down-low” (having clandestine sex with men while leading apparently heterosexual lives), and showcases Child's unique ability to get people to reveal themselves.
MIRROR WORLD
In collaboration with Gary Sullivan and Mehboob Khan’s AAN. A reshaping of Khan’s classic Bollywood feature, locating its narrative tropes against mistranslated subtitles….becoming “multi-lingual” in the maneuver. Formal play and poetic montage wrench causality to create a sub-version of class conflict and desire.
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TO AND NO FRO
Speculative play with image and sound outside the frame. Status and culture crack the mirror of family secrets, dreams, hauntings and wish-fulfillment in shifting and multiplying frames.