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THE OBITUARY PROJECT

Hope Tucker reframes the passing of sites, people, communities, freedoms, cultural markers, rituals, and ways of being. Since 2000, as director of The Obituary Project, a compendium of time and lens-based works that transform a daily narrative form and the antiquated documentary practice of salvage ethnography, she has documented shuttered bread factories, contested monuments, and fallen witness trees; animated cyanotypes of downwinders and old instructions for making fishing nets by hand; written the entire text of a video out of paper clips, a Norwegian symbol of nonviolent resistance; retraced the path of protest that closed the only nuclear power plant in Austria; recorded mobile phone footage of the last public phone booths in Finland; and preserved reckonings made by travelers to the site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb.  

Her works have screened in cultural spaces including Ambulante, Mexico City; Blickle Kino, 21er Haus, Vienna; Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Buenos Aires; Cairo Video Festival; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Flaherty NYC at Anthology Film Archives; International Film Festival, Rotterdam; Musee de l’Homme, Paris; Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Torino; New York Film Festival; PBS affiliates in Chicago, Guam, and Tennessee; Punto de Vista Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra, Pamplona; Sundance Film Festival; Whitechapel Gallery, London.


Contact

Screening inquiries: 
bookings@cfmdc.org


What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto

13:45 minutes
typeface: Souvenir
2021

Visitors and residents of the Tularosa Basin, site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb, contribute to the production of public memory as they offer logistical advice, philosophical reckonings, and plaintive texts about making "the journey of the dead." Between 1945 and 1992, the US federal government exposed people to the radioactive fallout from over 200+ detonations of above-ground nuclear weapons. Made in remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the detonation of nuclear weapons in the US and Japan and the 340th anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.  The 1680 Pueblo Revolt forced Spanish colonizers out of New Mexico and returned sovereignty to Native people. Made in resistance to nuclear colonialism.



"Tucker's way of representing the historical past makes us reconsider what the past historical time should be and what kind of action we should take to commemorate it." Kim Taein, Curator of Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan

What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto screened as part of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and was featured on Sundance Satellite Screens at Amherst Cinema in MA and Indie Memphis in TN. It was the winner of the 15th Busan International Video Art Festival; Best of Fest at COOP Gallery Microcinema, Nashville; Best Short Documentary at Newburyport Documentary Festival; Exceptional Essay Film at Feminist Border Arts Festival, New Mexico State Art Museum, Las Cruces; received an Honorable Mention from the 42nd Cine Festival San Antonio; and was a Small Axe Award Finalist at the Tolpuddle Radical Film Festival, Dorset, UK.  Screenings include Borders No Borders Film Festival, Houston Cinema Arts Society; Chicago Critics Film Festival, Music Box Theater; Cinema Columbus, Drexel Theatre + The Gateway Film Center; Collective Misnomer, Denver; Columbus International Film and Animation Festival; Denver Film Festival; Docu Film Léon, Guanajuato; Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque; Guam International Film Festival, Hagatña; Loft Film Fest, Tucson; Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder; Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival; Prismatic Ground, Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Regina International Film Festival, SK, Canada; Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Australia; Rooftop Films, Cemetery Shorts, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn; Split Film Festival/ International Festival of New Film, Croatia; Swedenborg Film Festival, London; Tacoma International Film Festival; Uranio em Moviemento, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janiero, Brazil; Västerås Film Festival, Sweden.