Chick Strand

Chick Strand's SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2015.

A bewitching, mysterious work of enveloping beauty, the film’s ominous title and a dedication to Anne Frank deeply inform our reading of its haunting subtext. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with the National Film Preservation Foundation, in 2009.

A short piece of commercial work done by three legendary L.A. artists. This piece was shown on loop projectors in Sears stores to promote an exciting and new young ladies' clothing line. 16mm print preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Loose Ends is a collage film about the process of internalizing the information that bombards us through a combination of personal experience and media in all forms. Speeding through our senses in ever-increasing numbers and complicated mixtures of fantasy, dream and reality from both outside and in, these fragmented images of life, sometimes shared by all, sometimes isolated and obscure, but with common threads, lead us to a state of psychological entropy tending toward a uniform inertness… an insensitive un-involvement in the human condition and our own humanity. —Chick Strand

An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman.

Poetic surrealism. Approach is experimental in relationship of image and sound. A film about the loss of innocence and the search for the essence of the human spirit. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

A Mexican flower seller’s story of personal tragedy is delicately illuminated in an intimate and moving act of portraiture that is both unsettling and liberating. In her final film, Chick Strand mixes brutal heartbreak and palpable joy into a transformative vision of dignity and vitality.

Filmed at Mission San Francisco de Guayo on the Orinoco River Delta in Venezuela, in 1965. A Franciscan nun and an Indian woman describe the Indian way of life before and after the arrival of the mission 20 years prior to the making of the film; their words are translated to English voice-over. They discuss marriage ceremonies, fishing, gender roles in work distribution and family responsibilities, shamanism and death rituals. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with National Film Preservation Foundation in 2011.