IN CINEMA
Good Enough Mother: An Evening with Sofia Theodore-Pierce and Leigh N. Gallagher
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
Friday, December 8th at 7PM
With a handful of short works, Sofia Theodore-Pierce has cultivated a uniquely frenetic mode of diary filmmaking that refracts subjective experience through a pantheon of feminist influences, the weight of color and objects, and the singular character of her mother, whose voice holds the center of each delicately bricolaged film in this selection. Theodore-Pierce’s lived experience with epilepsy informs a stroboscopic to-and-fro; bursts of brightly contrasted 16mm film stock and intimate soundscapes enclose the vast reaches of memory in a music box of affective pleasures, set to the rhythms of nature. Letters and poetry play off the doleful thrum of conversation, while literary spirits stalk the frame, stirring the dust of quotidian life. Charged with queer eroticism, these films mark their viewer gently, like the remembered touch of a distant lover. Inevitably, they linger.
Writer Leigh N. Gallagher will introduce the films and, playing on Theodore-Pierce’s choice of muse, will read from a short selection of texts on mothers, mothering, daughtering, and the telling of mother-stories.
FILM PROGRAM:
Hear Me Sometimes (2020, 14 min.)
Butterfly as verb, Butterfly as birth control, Butterfly as precarious achievement, Butterfly as speed, Butterfly as sleeping dram, and someone to love in 157 years.
The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy.
Other Tidal Effects (2021, 7 min.)
Catamenial seizures, tidal correspondences, a sonic EEG, and a lullaby in partial translation. Highlighting the seams with the darts. An exploration of epileptic rhythms and sensations through moving image practice.
Exterior Turbulence (2023, 11 min.)
Seizure dreams, horses, and long distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring my mother and other star crossed lovers.
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Sofia Theodore-Pierce is a teaching artist and filmmaker. Their nonfiction films balance choreographed engagement with collected ephemera and unrehearsed home movie aesthetics to explore the spaces, bodies, and social structures we inhabit. Their work has been exhibited at festivals and venues such as Irish Film Institute, WORM Rotterdam, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Athens Film & Video Festival, Prismatic Ground, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS and FRACTO Berlin. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Leigh N. Gallagher is the author of the novel Who You Might Be (Holt, 2022). Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Lit Hub, Full Stop Magazine, American Short Fiction, Reading Room (anthology), and in a number of non-traditional print formats through collaborative projects with visual artists and musicians. Originally from California, she currently lives in Philadelphia where she works as a copywriter and editor.
