FILM
Diane Bonder's film work is inspiring and haunting. Her films are fractured fairy tales about love, loss and displacement. Using optical printing techniques (re-filming frame after frame by hand) to overlay images on top of images, these films poignantly speak through washes of sensuous layers of pictures and sounds. The results are dreamlike journeys through everyday life.Bonder tells stories about personal memory, growing up queer, and forgotten places. Her narratives sometimes embrace a mix of archival films, photo albums and childhood games to trace the complexities of family dynamics and love relationships gone awry. Her films also let us have a complicated look at landscapes that go unnoticed – singling out the workings of gentrification through every faded sign and closed storefront – remembering small town U.S.A without nostalgia but with a historian's keen sense of detail. It is in the details that her stories come alive. Her films are poetic treasures.