COLD WAR CHRISTMAS / Louisiana Premiere

In 1970's America, an Eastern Bloc immigrant family lovingly celebrates a beautiful Christmas Eve...but is all calm and bright? Made using analogue and digital equipment with Super 8 film from 1971, this non-fiction experimental work is an immersive collage of image, sound, and silence that evokes the defector's experience of displacement during the Cold War era.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT:

For me, working on this film was marked by exhilarating combinations of contrasts: the old and the modern, technically; the personal/private and universal/public, thematically; the ordinary and extraordinary, in imagery, content, and process; and silence and sound, in the sound design. I had the pleasure of working with my grandfather's Super 8 film footage from 1971, analogue equipment from the same era (8mm film projector, telecine box, film viewer and splicer), and modern digital camera equipment to create the film's cinematography. And I made the film's soundtrack to feature today's voices of the young mother and father in the film reel, my grandparents, then in their twenties and now in their seventies.