Matthew LaPaglia

A haunted woman named Ida journeys from Germany to Jordan, to an eerie and deserted port town on the Red Sea where her partner, Ismail, recently disappeared. Wandering through desolate bars, hotels, and offices, Ida attempts to feel Ismail’s presence one last time and to say goodbye.

Is art at its best when it's nothing at all? The filmmaker is and isn't the subject of this sharp artist profile, which confronts the concepts of distance and closeness in the documentary form itself when his subject Miles—an artist whose work concerns psychologist Harry Harlow's famous experiments with baby monkeys and cloth surrogate mothers—drops out of the project.