Living At Risk

Using photographs, interviews, home movies, and footage shot in Philadelphia and abroad, Family Portrait Sittings tells the story of the filmmaker's family, from their origins in Italy to their life in the United States.

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

In this brief film, Alfred Guzzetti dissects a single image taken by his amateur-photographer father seventy-three years ago. The photograph, taken at night, features an empty street in Philadelphia. Street lamps glow, light subtly reflected in the asphalt below. As Guzzetti traces the origins of the image, a tender portrait of his father comes into focus. What was and what could have been are inexplicably entwined in one static shot.

Resembling a glimpse inside the DNA of modern existence, Guzzetti’s breathtaking composition seems to harness all the visible and invisible forces that connect and disconnect humanity. The various natural, political, violent, serene, exhilarating and alienating powers comprise a mediated complex through which the focal point of mortality appears both ever-present and faraway. Guzzetti pinpoints this surreal tension by recognizing its inherent blindness.