Structuring Strategies: Brigid McCaffrey and Thorbjorg Jonsdottir

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Structuring Strategies presents Brigid McCaffrey and Thorbjorg Jonsdottir.

Brigid McCaffrey

Brigid McCaffrey makes films about subjects who appear to be mis/displaced in the world and the shifting regions they encounter. Featuring Sikhs in the California desert, young female truck drivers on the American interstate, and nuns as riverboat captains, her films have screened in Rotterdam, Portland, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere. She is currently working with an itinerant geologist speculating on survivalist living in the Mojave region.

CASTAIC LAKE
28:30, 16mm, color, sound, 2010
camera/sound/edit: Brigid McCaffrey

Taking its course, the camera drifts in to the coves and surveys the shorelines of a multi-use reservoir to unearth fragments of its young history and consider a series of possible relationships to this artificial environment. Visits are filled with a sense of potentials and the unseen, the lake's surface separating what is buried and what is to come. Municipal mobilizations, recreational episodes, and small pageants trace this body’s perimeter.

Filmography
Castaic Lake (28:30, 16mm, 2010)
AM/PM (9:00, 16mm, 2010)
Tjúba Ten/The Wet Season, co-directed w/ Ben Russell (47:00, 16mm, 2008)
Lay Down Tracks, co-directed w/ Danielle Lombardi (61:00, 16mm, 2006)

Thorbjorg Jonsdottir

Thorbjorg Jonsdottir grew up in a small fishing village in Eastern Iceland.  As a teenager she spent her summers packing lobster in the local freezing factory and hanging out behind the kiosk with her friends.  She holds a BA degree in visual arts from the Iceland Academy of Arts and a MFA in filmmaking from the Program in Film & Video at California Institute of the Arts. 

Thorbjorg’s films have screened both in galleries and the film festival circuit, in Europe and the US.  Thorbjorg currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California where she teaches at California Institute of the Arts, Program in Film and Video.

Óskar afi, Guðrún and Park St  
3 min each, 16mm, 2007, 2009, 2011
Three short portrait films, of my grandfather, my niece and the neighborhood where I used to live in Newhall.

Ocean Ocean
15 min, 16mm, 2009,
A young woman discovers a magical chamber in her house. After entering the chamber she begins experiencing a fluid movement in time; the borders of dream and reality blur and unfamiliar characters start appearing in her house.

Amazon (working title, work in progress)
15 min, 16mm on HD
Ten years ago, traveling through South-America, I befriended a family of Huitoto Indians living in the Colombian Amazon.  In 2011 I returned to see if I could find them again, and to begin filming a piece on the landscape of the Amazon, the plant medicine used by its indigenous cultures, and the spirit world of the jungle.