In the Works: EARTH CAMP ONE

The director of the seminal PARIS IS BURNING meditates on how we cope with loss, or, perhaps more tellingly, how we try not to.

Jennie Livingston lost four close members of her family in the span of five years. Forced to confront this much loss back-to-back, she became conscious of the deep discomfort our society has around death and impermanence. Taking a first-person approach, her film explores the impact of this stigma, both on the personal level and broadening out to its impact on American and global culture. At the same time, Jennie looks back on her experience at a “hippie summer camp” she attended in the 1970s, and the youthful impulse to chart ones own identity separate from one’s family – an impulse which becomes recontextualized and reconsidered when one’s family is later taken away due to death.

Jennie is nearing the end of a Kickstarter campaign that will finance a rough cut, and has raised more than half of her $40,000 goal. With a week left, there’s still time to learn more about the project and to consider making a donation. The project also has a fundraising event coming up this weekend – more info on Facebook.

There’s no denying the impact that PARIS IS BURNING had and continues to have on questions of race, class, gender, and community. It has influenced scores of documentary filmmakers and critics, helped launch the New Queer Cinema, and has been at the core of academic discussions and debates around a cross-section of areas, from film to cultural studies, anthropology to African American studies. Jennie’s new film hopes to engage in a similar cultural dialogue, focused on the universal subject of loss. Taking an essay approach, the film promises to be very different from PARIS, putting Jennie at its center, but it is also the product of a more mature filmmaker, drawing on thirty years of her experiences. Posing questions that everyone must face at some point, the film promises to go beyond the personal to connect with its viewers and their own issues around mortality, family, and impermanence.