Moyra Davey

Filmed almost entirely in the artist’s New York apartment, Moyra Davey draws parallels between her familial experience and the family of 18th-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Leafing through postcards, book pages, and her own photographs as she talks, Davey reflects on varied approaches to photography and film, such as planned versus unscripted recording of reality and the passage from private to public realms with a camera. Davey punctuates her narration with thoughts on writing as she simultaneously listens to and recites a script based on her 2011 essay, “The Wet and the Dry.”

Moyra Davey’s raw confessional situates the filmmaker and her extended community of friends alongside tributes, homages, and citations, illuminating a collective memory while fostering a constellation of kinship between artists and thinkers.

In her latest home recorded essay film, Canadian artist Moyra Davey explores Québec’s knotty history of oppression through an array of perspectives and personalities. Inspired by James Baldwin and taking off from texts and theories by Québécois thinkers Hubert Aquin, Pierre Vallières, Dalie Giroux, and Ann Charney (some of whom appear on camera), Davey ruminates on notions of colonization, her father’s role in the October Crisis, and the ongoing denigration of the First Nations populace. Collapsing public and private spheres through various media (Skype, Youtube, etc.), Davey turns her home into a battlefield of conflicted interests and ideologies.

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

Following Jean-Pierre Gorin, and other New Wave filmmakers, Moyra Davey’s transparency allows us to explore the space between the text and the writer’s construction of the narrative, between text and reader, between word and interpretation. The film My Saints is a collective portrait of friends and family as they interpret a passage from Genet’s journal—in which he watches a friend frantically search for money that he stole—and elaborate their own experiences of deception. Davey’s project is one in which a text becomes a source for delving into a rigorous scrutiny of one’s self.

A wedding party reflected through the work of 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

A Super-8 essay film about New York City bedrock, excrement, and money

Hemlock Forest traces the worlds of Karl Ove Knaugsard and Chantal Akerman as Davey considers the implications of her son leaving home and Akerman's suicide.