A FILM BY IVANA HUCÍKOVÁ, GRACE REMINGTON & SARAH KEELING WITH M.ELAINE & CASSANDRA BROMFIELD

Transcription

1 A FILM BY IVANA HUCÍKOVÁ, GRACE REMINGTON & SARAH KEELING WITH M.ELAINE & CASSANDRA BROMFIELD

2 Credits Co-Directors Grace Remington Producer Grace Remington Archival Cinematography Cassandra Bromfield M.Elaine Bromfield FILM INFO Original title: Into My Life Running time: 15 min Country of production: United States Color: Color Shooting formats: Super-8, Digital Original language: English Website: uniondocs.org/into-my-life Trailer: vimeo.com/ Press contact: Cinematography Editor Assistant Editor Sound Recording Into My life is a production of the 2017 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio. Since 2010, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art has guided select groups of documentary fellows in our Collaborative Studio Program through a 10-month production cycle. Coming from a wide diversity of backgrounds and countries, the CoLab has been an invaluable experience to meet other collaborators, enact ideas, and expand as a filmmaker.

3 SHORT SYNOPSIS Growing up in the largest affordable housing cooperative in Brooklyn, Cassandra s world was artfully framed by her mother s Super-8 camera. Today, still living in the same place, Cassandra examines and edits these remarkable films, gaining insight into the challenges her mother faced as a creative black woman and the importance of her vision. LONG SYNOPSIS Growing up in the 60 s and 70 s in the largest affordable housing cooperative in Brooklyn,Cassandra Bromfield s world was artfully framed by her mother s Super-8 camera. A schoolteacher with many creative talents, Cassandra s mom documented the exuberance of her neighborhood s public spaces, showcasing the lively pool, the packed playground, and the graffitied handball court. Children and teenagers gleefully performed in front of her Bolex. The passion to create was passed from mother to daughter, as was the lease on the affordable apartment. Cassandra still lives in the same place, working as a fashion designer during the day, sewing her clients visions, and as a filmmaker at night, assembling documents of her own life and environment with stunning images captured by her mother. When Cassandra posts her edits online, she notes the lack of comparable footage of other black families from the time, much less footage shot by black women. She believes that her mother s intent behind the camera was to show that the lives of the people around her, people who might otherwise be forgotten, mattered. By exploring this remarkable and rich archive alongside Cassandra s candid narration, Into My Life pays a moving tribute to the artistic practice of this mother-daughter duo, the community present in their neighborhood, and the power in creative self-representation.

4 ARTIST S STATEMENT This project initially focused on the Lindsay Park Co-op as a means of exploring affordable housing in New York City. As soon as we met Cassandra Broomfield and viewed her extensive archive, we realized that attention needed to be paid to her trove of materials and the work she continues to do to preserve her legacy and that of her mother, M. Elaine Broomfield, a school teacher and amateur documentarian. Documentation of black domestic life from the 1960s onwards is rare enough, archivally speaking; and documentation of the subject by a pair of black female filmmakers is even more extraordinary. Beyond the archival material itself, however, Cassandra s relationship to her mother, her mother s legacy, and her own identity as part of this continuum resonated with all of us personally and as filmmakers. In developing Into My Life, we sought to pay tribute to two amazing women, the films that they made, and the relationships that they had with each other and with their cameras. Formally, we decided to use Cassandra s own voice to guide the film, allowing her to narrate our exploration of her archive and discuss her history of filmmaking and that of her mother. The piece is really by and for Cassandra; her collaboration and her archive were both fundamental in informing the structure of the final product. By placing the archival material in conversation with contemporary footage shot with Cassandra in her home, we also sought to highlight the current state of Lindsay Park and showcase Cassandra s life as it stands now, in her mother s absence. Highlighting her work as a fashion designer allowed us to establish connections between her filmmaking and her professional pursuits while also underscoring her mother s continued influence. Although Cassandra is the keeper of these 8-mm films, she is also much more than that; by having Cassandra tell her story in her own words and show us her life as she lives it today, we sought to bring her archive into the present and present her in all of its glory.

5 Grace Remington works in documentary film and television in the US, Mexico, and Peru. She worked as the archival producer for Abstract: The Art of Design (Netflix) and was a fellow in UnionDocs 2017 Collaborative Studio. She is currently working on two feature-length documentaries to debut in TEAM is a documentary filmmaker from Bratislava, Slovakia, currently working in film and TV. She was a UnionDocs 2017 Collaborative Studio Fellow, an IFP s 2018 Made in NY Media Center Fellow and participated in the IDFAcademy 2017 in Amsterdam. Ivana s documentary work has been presented, screened and distributed internationally. is an artist and documentary filmmaker, creating films and interdisciplinary projects. She was a 2017 fellow in UnionDocs Collaborative Studio and has been awarded a 2018 fellowship at IFP s Made in NY Media Center in support of her upcoming documentary series. Sarah s work has been exhibited internationally.