At Home and Asea

(2002) Video, color, sound, 70 minutes

“In At Home and Asea, Five Baltimore residents grapple –no self pity allowed–with their feelings of being stuck in lives that are less than meaningful. Street’s amalgam of documentary and fiction is poignant and, thanks to Guy Yarden’s score, anxiety-provoking. It’s also a subtly crafted portrait of an economically blighted city, pulled between North and South and central to neither.” – Amy Taubin, Village Voice

Experimental filmmaker Mark Street, who lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, returns to Filmforum with the L.A. premiere of At Home and Asea (2002), a collage of portraits charting the disillusionment shared by a group of Baltimore denizens. Street, whose previous work includes striking abstract pieces, as well as films in which he’s scratched and bleached the emulsion, here works with digital video; this allows him to capture intimate and casual moments with his subjects, who include three single mothers, a 23-year-old beer-drinking slacker and a man trying to understand his deceased father’s lpge by revisiting what the elderly man left behind. While it’s never entirely clear what’s scripted and what’s real, the video nevertheless gradually acquires a weighty torpor as the characters fight the inertia wrought by the exhausting, uphill struggle to create lives that live up to expectations. Street has always been adept at aligning invisible emotions with their physical counterparts, and here he perfectly captures his subjects’ anomie with images of Baltimore’s anonymous buildings and blighted neighborhoods. Their growing despair is perhaps best embodied, though, in shots showing boats bobbing slowly up and down on the gray water against the evanescent, lead-colored fog.” – Holly Willis, LA Weekly 

Selected Screenings:

• Museum of Modern Art, 2003
• Blinding Light Cinema, 2003
• Squeaky Wheel, 2003
• Kansas City Filmmaker’s Jubilee, 2003
• Berks Filmmakers, 2003
• Dallas Video Festival, 2003
• Mill Valley Film Festival, 2002
• Wisconsin Film Festival, 2002
• Johns Hopkins Film Festival, 2002
• Media Co-op Digital Film Festival, 2002
• Pioneer Theatre, 2002
• Anthology Film Archives, 2002
• Film Forum, 2002
• Red Eye Theater, 2002
• Creative Alliance Moviemakers, 2002