Films & Media
WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS (2018/20)
The death of Michael Brown, shot by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer in 2014, was national news after protests erupted there. But the history of Ferguson, a formerly whites-only “sundown town,” and the neighboring black town of Kinloch, now semi-abandoned, is not well known. Incorporating reflections of residents of Kinloch and Ferguson (including Gillooly, who grew up in Ferguson), this film explores the relationship between these two towns. Beginning with a 1960s roadblock that divided then-white Ferguson from black Kinloch, the film depicts a micro-history of race relations in America. (more)
SUITCASE OF LOVE AND SHAME (2013)
A forbidden love story played out in a decade that would soon spawn the sexual revolution, Suitcase of Love and Shame reconstructs a mesmerizing and erotic narrative from 60 hours of reel-to-reel audiotape discovered in a suitcase purchased on eBay. Part historical documentary and part experimental narrative the film repurposes this rare audio example from the 1960s to critically examine a particular moment in the history of the United States. (more)
Distributed by Cinema Guild
AUDIENCE OF LOVE AND SHAME (2015)
Concept/Director: Jane Gillooly, Camera and Producer: Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman
A filmed document of an audience imagining. An unattended camera observes an audience watching, listening, and in their own minds completing a film. AUDIENCE was commissioned and filmed at the Museum of the Moving Image as members of the consenting public listened and watched Suitcase of Love and Shame – a film that privileges sound over image and compels the spectator to invent much of the visual. Viewers observe other viewers envisioning. The installed video was presented as part of First Look 2015. AUDIENCE was filmed during the opening weekend of the festival and installed on the closing weekend. For film print contact: loveandshame@gmail.com
Love & Radio Podcast, Jeannie & Tom based on Suitcase of Love and Shame 2016 https://loveandradio.org/2017/07/suitcase-of-love-and-shame/
Snap Judgment Podcast, Suitcase of Love and Shame 2016
https://www.wnyc.org/story/suitcase-love-and-shame-snap-730-rivals/
TODAY THE HAWK TAKES ONE CHICK (2008
The film highlights the lives of three grandmothers who have become instrumental in defining a new world order dictated by HIV/AIDS. Living in the Lubombo region of the Kingdom of Eswatini, a society in 2007 at the threshold of simultaneous collapse and reinvention. Without an overt narrative structure, the film’s drama emerges from the steady accumulation of details that tell a greater story of family in a world dictated by HIV. Represented for distribution by DER, Documentary Educational Resources.
http://der.org/films/hawk-takes-one-chick.html
LEONA’S SISTER GERRI (1995)
For Gerri Santoro and so many women like her the challenges to obtaining a safe legal abortion were insurmountable and in 1964 the legal and the social system did not protect her. This historic film tells the story of Gerri Santoro, a working-class mother of two and the “real person” in the now famous police photograph of an anonymous woman on a motel floor. The image that galvanized America’s abortion movement. Distributed by NEW DAY FILMS (more)
https://www.newday.com/films/leonas-sister-gerri
SPLENDOR (2005)
A short film adapted from the experimental narrative script “The Not Dead Yet Club”. Directed by Jane Gillooly, co-written by Maribeth Edmonds and Jane Gillooly, it explores the ways that women’s identities change as their bodies and minds become less reliable. With both humor and honesty, it illuminates the richness of friendship, the importance of self-determination, and the capacity for growth, even as dementia and death approach.
For film print contact: loveandshame@gmail.com
DRAGONFLIES, THE BABY CRIES (35mm b/w 2000) 10 minutes
Verging in tone from the coy to the sinister, “Dragonflies” merges sight, sound, and narrative in a quieter and more quotidian version of Fantasia’s Night On Bald Mountain sequence. – Peter Keough, The Boston Phoenix “a miniature masterpiece of childhood whimsy” – Gary Morris, San Francisco Examiner With music by Alloy Orchestra.
For film print, contact: loveandshame@gmail.com
THEME: MURDER (1998)
coproduced by Jane Gillooly with director Martha Swetzoff.
In the spring of 1968, Boston art dealer Hyman Swetzoff was beaten and left to die in his Bay Village home. The murder remains unsolved. Years later, his daughter, director Martha Swetzoff, now a filmmaker, delves into the many unanswered questions that still surround her father’s death. Each question leads to others, revealing family secrets and institutional inadequacies. By tracing the impact of the crime on Hyman’s family and friends over 30 years, the film shows us the real meaning of “haunting.”
Distributed by NEW DAY FILMS
https://www.newday.com/films/theme-murder