What We Left Unfinished

Adapted from the novel Bid Me To Live by the poet H.D. (written 1933–50, published 1960) and shot in houses occupied by military families on Governors Island, NYC, from the 1770s to the 1960s, To Live is about what happens on the fringes of a war, and the extremes and estrangements that war produces—how dancing on “the last-straw edge of everything” makes us strangers not only to each other but also to ourselves. It is propelled by a text that spirals through a perpetual state of siege, suspension and postponement, marking the inroads that the state makes on our ability to love and to live.

A kaleidoscopic trip through the intertwined histories of pandemics, riots, and colonial violence. An archive constantly haunted by its possible collapse. Featuring the voices of science journalist Sonia Shah, poet and literary scholar Anjuli Raza Kolb, medical anthropologist Christos Lynteris, epidemiologist Keiji Fukuda, economist William A. Darity Jr., and historians Nayan Shah, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Nancy Tomes.

DIS-EASE is a feature-length documentary about how we imagine disease, and how that affects what we do when we encounter illness, outbreaks, doctors, treatments, and disability in real life. It dives deep into the weird, wild archives of medical imaging, public health messaging, and pop-culture outbreak narratives to understand how ideas have moved between science, science fiction, and political ideology over the past century. (Yes, this is a film that covers both antibiotic resistance and the persistence of zombie apocalypse films.) Ultimately, DIS-EASE is a provocation to re-think how we define both the "public" and "health" in public health - who is included, what counts as care, and what it means to be sick or well in a world perpetually on the brink of collapse.