SIGNAL AND NOISE
Dir. Jess Shane and Katie Mathews, 2022
Produced in collaboration with Mansoor Adayfi
What are the sounds of Guantánamo Bay Detention Center? In 2015, poet Jordan Scott set out to record the ambient sounds of the prison as a means of bypassing its strict media censorship rules. Today, former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, recalls how sound shaped his experiences there— both of torture and of hope. The year of the 20th anniversary of the prison, Scott’s field recordings and Adayfi’s memories come together to create a visceral new landscape of this notoriously secret place.
Thanks to the NFB Filmmaker Assistance Program 2021
Screening History
Prismatic Ground Film Festival, Premiere, May 2022, New York City, NY
Mimesis Film Festival, August 2022, Boulder, CO
Third Horizon Film Festival, June 2022, Miami, FL
Nashville Film Festival, September 2022, Nashville, TN
Hot Springs Film Festival, October 2022, Albuquerque, NM
Antimatter Film Festival, October 2022, Victoria, BC
New Orleans Film Festival, November 2022, New Orleans, Experimental Short: Special Jury Recognition
Future of Film Showcase, May 2023, Toronto
Exhibition History
Sight/Geist: Policing Reality - Screening at The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation / The 8th Floor
Sound of Fire - Exhibition at VisArts, Rockville, MD; Curated by Gabrielle Tillenburg
Distributed by the Winnipeg Film Group.
To Be Honest
Dir. Jess Shane, 2021
16 women regularly upload their trauma on YouTube. Are these videos honesty, performance, or both? In To Be Honest, the line between attempts to heal and commune online is blurred, as these women attempt to reconcile their sincere need to be heard with the pressure to sustain viewership.
While these YouTubers express that telling their most harrowing personal stories to an online audience is useful to others and therapeutic to them, their videos raise questions too: is the level of scrutiny women are subjected to online worth any potentially healing effects? Why has it become normalized for young women to turn the performance of vulnerability into a career? What does this paradox say about the challenge for women of growing up online?
Screening History
Mimesis Film Festival, August 2021, Boulder, CO
Leisure, Pleasure
Dir. Jess Shane, 2021
Landscapes of a luxury cruise explore visions of class, wealth, and utopia.
Screening History
DOC NYC, 2021
Seeing Her Again Like This
Dir. Jess Shane, 2015
Seeing her again like this is a 30-minute two-channel video that sets a man’s photos and story of the events leading up to his divorce, alongside re-enactments by actors. In so doing, it raises questions about the ethics of recounting a shared past, the equivocality of memory, and the politics of listening.
Link on request.
