Film
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Mary Ellen's Trees
2017
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Mary Ellen’s Trees pays homage to the smallest public park in San Francisco and the extraordinary woman to whom the park is dedicated. This tiny and mostly overlooked park is a humble reminder of who is valued and how in our shared cultural history. The park primarily consists of the six trees planted by Mary Ellen Pleasant herself. They stand alive and majestic amongst the daily goings on of city life, as an enduring witness to everything that unfolds around them.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Sightline
2016
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Sightline sprang from repeated careful viewings of the Super 8 footage that my father shot. I discovered a momentary exchange between myself and a woman who was once my babysitter, Stella Cheek, that set into motion a personal inquiry about the influence of three African-American women on me and the trajectory of my life. It is an attempt to forge my own understanding of and relationship to the troubled history and tropes of race-relations in the South.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Stranded
2015
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Stranded is an investigation into memory, place and loss. Through it I revisit the streets and surrounding agricultural land of a small Central Valley town where I was stranded nearly twenty years ago as I drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the last leg of a move across country. I am glancing back with a different perspective, both personally as well as from a cultural, climate and historic standpoint.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Speed
2014
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Speed is a meditation on memory and aging. Distance and speed are two of the variables in the formula for uniform motion. The other variable is time. This formula is a way to calculate a journey – how long it takes, how fast you get there and how far you travel.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Distance
2014
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Distance is a meditation on time and aging. It engages questions about the distance or proximity that exists between us as individuals and between one to their natural surroundings. It is intended as a timepiece that uses rhythm along with visual and aural cadence to reflect on life cycles and the interconnectedness of those cycles.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Ms. Irmie's Curse
2014
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My grandparents lived and farmed on a small rise in the Piedmont Region of North Carolina. From their front porch you could see the neighboring farm on the next hill. Ms. Irmie lived on that farm with her husband, Guy. I have always remembered the murmurings of a curse put on our family by Ms. Irmie, a curse that was supposed to keep the women in my family from being happy in their relationships. I asked my aunts, sister and female cousins to recount their version of the curse to me, but no one seemed to remember anything about it except my mother and me. Ms. Irmie’s Curse explores that family lore and how, whether or not it is true or ever even happened, the suggestion of its complex narrative continues to unfold.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Keeping Time
2013
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Family histories are thrust upon us, but we can choose how we want to remember them. Through the objects I have selected to carry with me through the years, I have generated my own version of family history. Keeping Time engages these talismans of memory and the stories that they hold, the secrets they might be keeping and the time that they have captured like so many fossils in stone.
PATTIANN KOURY Film (Please use website contact form to request link to view)
Captive
2013
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Captive was made as a way of thinking about being inside and how the outside leaks in, mostly in the form of light and sound.