2015 Sarah Jacobson Grantees

Mariah Garnett

Other and Father (working title) is a hybrid fiction-documentary film about my father, who I met for the first time in 2007. My father is Northern Irish, born and raised in Belfast. He was forced to flee at age 19 after appearing on a BBC human-interest story about his mixed Protestant-Catholic relationship. After it aired, he and his girlfriend received death threats and left the country fearing for their safety. He has never returned to Ireland and never spoke to anyone in his family again until 2015. Central to this project are inquiries into the ways in which memory is constructed and passed between generations, the ways in which media shapes and exploits local conflicts, and how queer identity is shaped in a place recovering from major conflict.

Caroline Key, 2015 Sarah Jacobson Film Grant recipient

Caroline Key

Khôra is a filmic inquiry into the medicalization of the female body. Inspired in part by the filmmaker’s experiences working as an OBGYN surgical videographer at a major metropolitan teaching hospital, the film investigates the relationship between visibility and medical knowledge (i.e. the “medical gaze”), and the subsequent creation of an image economy wherein intimate images of a patient’s body are circulated as the property of institutions. Khôra is an experimental essay that uses medical education procedural footage, original 3D medical animation and legal texts, alongside first person accounts. Invoking the ancient Greek notion of the khôra—both as a productive lack and a feminine site of potential—the film uses these elements to recuperate the female body from its historical rendering as a site of medical classification and inquiry.