Sanctuary Station, by Brigid McCaffrey
Sanctuary Station
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Sanctuary Station, by Brigid McCaffrey
Los Angeles premiere!
Thursday May 22, 2025, 7:30pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
Link: https://link.dice.fm/G4c0ac124ccc
In person discussion following the screening with director Brigid McCaffrey
Shot on high-contrast black-and-white 16mm film and Super 16, this incandescent work continues Brigid McCaffrey’s ongoing portraiture of individuals who seek anarchic communion with their adopted land, weaving a rough, hallucinatory patchwork of encounters with women, old and young, solitary and collective, who live or work among the wildlife of the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. Through voiceover, the women share intimate observations of their primeval environment alongside personal stories of self-revelation, abstention, and conviction. These gradually merge in choral-like meditation, led by the richly timbred voice of the late poet Mary Norbert Körte, an ex-nun and Beat associate. - Edo Choi, Senior Programmer, First Look 2025, Museum of the Moving image
Brigid McCaffrey is a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker whose work documents environments and people in states of flux. Her films explore extremes of autonomy and coexistence experienced by individuals who have distinct relationships with the land. Often taking shape as nuanced portraits, the films respond to the physical and emotional changes of their subjects while fusing representations of self and place.
She has exhibited at venues such as the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Whitechapel Gallery, and in film festivals including Ambulante, Frontiera Festival, Images Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Rotterdam Interna0onal Film Festival, among others. Her work was presented by Ballroom Marfa for Artist’s Film International, the Flaherty Seminar, and the Pesaro Film Festival. McCaffrey was named a Guggenheim fellow in Film & Video in 2019.
Sanctuary Station
Sanctuary Station
Directed, Filmed, Edited by Brigid McCaffrey
2024, 16mm to digital, b&w, sound, 69 min.
Sanctuary Station traces a series of encounters with women and youth who have cultivated intrinsic attachments to the various life forms inhabiting the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. Oscillations between the desire for solitude and the need for collaboration recur through an album-like progression of personal stories and actions. These encounters are framed through the poems of Mary Norbert Korte (1934-2022), an ex-nun who built her own cabin deep in the forest, adjacent to a former logging railroad. Korte’s life and work bear witness to the daily phenomena of internal and external experience. Depictions of ongoing forest defense movements, collective and personal rites of mourning, and intimate everyday routines evoke cycles of life unfolding within this intricately interwoven environment.