Cathy Lee Crane

Vita revisits her first attempt at filmmaking 15 years prior. Shooting a semi-autobiographical film starring her friend Dina, Vita’s eager but inexperienced approach causes the production to spiral into chaos, leading to significant disruptions and a near-fatal accident.

History haunts the border town of Columbus, N.M. when Mexican riders on horseback cross the line to commemorate Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid. As border dwellers and their divergent accounts of the Villa raid are introduced, the existential borderline that shapes their lives comes into focus.

An adaptation of the fountain of youth tale and a lyrical meditation on the quotidian gestures of strangers. These lives, captured in the streets of Rome, constitute the counter-shot for the landscape through which a fictional character wanders, adrift. After meeting a young girl in the Campo di Fiori market, a woman who has come to Rome to die, journeys through its many fountains, haunted by visions of lost innocence. Staged on locations from the Roman films of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

A poetic adaptation of the fountain of youth fable, Adrift follows a woman who has come to Rome to die. On her journey through the city, she encounters a young girl who taunts her with visions of lost innocence. This film was staged on locations of Pasolini’s films and includes an original score by composer Ben Kamen. Adrift is a quiet opera at the center of an evolving study of the human gesture, the unconscious way in which hands hold things and the body moves. This direct encounter with the materiality of existence, the way it resides in the body is profoundly political. Pasolini wrote: "The education given to a boy by things, by objects, by physical reality—in other words, the material phenomena of his social condition—make that boy corporeally what he is and what he will be all his life. What has to be educated is his flesh as the mold of his spirit. Social condition is recognizable in the flesh of an individual."

Tra synthesizes the narrative of Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) by highlighting its interstitial moments. The act of running that appears throughout the film is isolated and deployed to expose the film’s subtextual currents.

A mosaic portrait of people who live along the US/Mexico border. Each of the fourteen channels represents one of the many crossing towns from Tijuana on the left to El Paso & the Rio Grande on the right.

This elegiac essay explores the year leading up to Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder in 1975. Through staging scenes from his last, unfinished novel, to exploring his polemical essays, and his first and last film, this experimental biography documents the final words of one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century.

In 1915, a German saboteur comes to Manhattan. Co-opting progressive labor politics, he provokes a neutral America into World War I.