Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re excited to welcome filmmaker Amy Reid to bring you an evening of cinema and conversation with her recent feature film, Long Haulers, and a sneak peek at a new project in the works too!

Amy Reid is an artist and filmmaker whose work examines the intersections between gender, national identity, and labor. By exploring observational approaches and expanding upon formal cinematic notions of time, structure, and narrative, Reid’s work questions how labor is constructed on film. These multi-year projects, often working closely with a group—long haul female truckers, quilters, e-commerce sellers—premise upon collaboration, performance, and experimentation.

In Long Haulers, through experimentation, direct observational filmmaking, and performative play, filmmaker Amy Reid rides and films with women truckers who have fled domestic violence, the stigmas of being formerly incarcerated, and mental health issues. Weaving together the stories of three truckers, Sandi, Lori, and Tracy, Long Haulers shares how each woman started trucking and what keeps them trucking.

Reid spoke with Joanne McNeil recently in Filmmaker Magazine, and Mcneil astutely points out the resonance of seeing the profession on screen:

Trucking is often romanticized in films like Smokey and the Bandit and Every Which Way but Loose, and the power of Long Haulers is in the new perspectives it brings. By turning her lens on middle-aged and older women in the industry, Reid complicates lingering notions of the vocation as gateway for adventure.

Reid will also be showing material from their new feature film, Grandmother’s Garden that explores the history of women, quilting, and US history. In this current work-in-progress, Reid will open up a bit of her practice that is examining how understanding the history and practice of quilting can help us to understand a clearer picture of America’s history with racism, settler colonialism, and capitalism.

We’re thrilled that Amy will be in attendance for a conversation with filmmaker Nellie Kluz following the screening. Come through!

Program

Long Haulers

74 mins, 2020

Grandmother’s Garden

A work in progress

Deriving its title from the classic quilt pattern “Grandmother’s Flower Garden,” Grandmother’s Garden examines the past and present production of quiltmaking as it relates to the histories of slavery and cotton production, westward expansion, and the textile industry in the United States.

Program Duration: 90 mins

Bios

Amy Reid is an artist and filmmaker whose work examines the intersections between gender, national identity, and labor. By exploring observational approaches and expanding upon formal cinematic notions of time, structure, and narrative, Reid’s work questions how labor is constructed in the filmic form through feature length films, video installations, and texts. These multi-year projects, often working closely with a group—long haul female truckers, quilters, e-commerce sellers—premise upon collaboration, performance, and experimentation. Reid received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2009 and her MFA in 2017 from the University of California, San Diego. Reid is an alumnus of The Whitney Independent Study Program. Currently she is a PhD Candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where part of her dissertation work is a feature-length 16mm and video experimental film looking at women, quilting, and 19th century US history.

Nellie Kluz makes nonfiction films about collective rituals, and the
work and infrastructure that support them. Her films have screened at
venues including the Camden International Film Festival, Chicago
Underground Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, International
Film Festival Rotterdam, Maryland Film Festival, Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, and
others. She received an MFA in Moving Image from the University of
Illinois at Chicago, and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25
Faces of Independent Film” in 2017. Her work has received funding from
the Princess Grace Foundation, and support from the Film/Video Studio
Program at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She has taught filmmaking
at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Iowa.
She also works as a cameraperson for others’ projects, including the
HBO show “How to With John Wilson.”