Lee Anne Schmitt

Nightingale is a film that uses a love affair to examine the way we recreate our own histories; continuously fictionalising our past and forever altering the events within them.

Taking her dad’s job at the Olin Corporation as its starting point, Lee Anne Schmitt interweaves meditative reflections on her biography and her own body with a history of the rise and widespread influence of conservative think tanks in the United States.

Made over 15 years, Adulthood is a feature composed of six short films, each chapter following a couple as they grow older without necessarily growing up.

Me Broni Ba is a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana. The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked through images of women practicing hair braiding on discarded white baby dolls from the West. The film unfolds through a series of vignettes, set against a child's story of migrating from Ghana to the United States. The film uncovers the meaning behind the Akan term of endearment, me broni ba, which means “my white baby.”

Las Vegas is a short video that uses the limitations of video imagery to explore the end of a love affair. It combines the lights of Las Vegas and the emptiness of early morning hotels to evoke the sense of intangibilty and loss left behind once love has gone.

For five years, Schmitt and Lynch followed the buffalo hunt in the American West. Their fascinating portrait of a disappearing world contrasts unspoiled landscapes with commercial influences on the American myth.

Can Los Angeles of the 30’s be effectively placed alongside modern 21st century Los Angeles? As a true experiment, Awake and Sing mixes periods and genres taking pleasure not in easy solutions, but in the search for a form or way of telling that has to be tried out, discovered.

Lee Anne Schmitt explores California's landscape and past to document the history of one-time boom towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation. Sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its onset, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and public interests. Schmitt's film covers various locations through time, as the major industries of the early 20th century (mining, lumber, oil) give way to the military, eventually leading to multinational corporations, and the use of small towns as satellites for growing urban metropolises.