Sasha Wortzel

What are some common themes that you typically explore in your work, and what themes would you like to explore next?

SW:  I use film, video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings, specifically along shorelines, boundary lines, and bodies of water.  My projects remix and reimagine archival and found materials to examine queer place-making, interdependence, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories. For a decade and a half, my filmmaking practice has run alongside professional work in art spaces & social movements around issues faced by queer, trans & gender non-conforming people, people of color, HIV positive people, and disabled people.

The themes and subject matter of your short This is an Address are incredibly heavy yet moving. What kind of impact were you hoping to make with this piece?

SW: While researching Happy Birthday, Marsha!, I learned about a makeshift encampment of unhoused HIV positive New Yorkers on the Hudson River piers, where activist Sylvia Rivera lived in the 1990s. Shortly thereafter I began working at the Whitney Museum’s newly opened Meatpacking District location overlooking the Hudson River, and realized my office view gazed directly onto the very site where Rivera lived twenty years prior. Over the course of my four years with the Museum, I witnessed rapid redevelopment of the river shoreline and homelessness in the city rose to the highest levels since the Great Depression. Considering the long legacy of displacement and erasure at this particular location, I began filming, ultimately interweaving my spectral present-day documentation of the waterfront with a 1995 interview with Rivera.  This is an Address (2020) continues my meditative engagement with themes of community, gentrification, and erasure.

In your film How to Carry Water, there must have been a massive amount of trust between you and the cast. How did you go about earning their trust in order to film their bodies in this vulnerable state?

I tend to make work about and with communities in which I am already embedded. With How to Carry Water, Shoog McDaniel and I had been friends for 20 years, and together we cast folks Shoog and I had already worked with. The locations in the film are places I have known and been visiting for years. We also implemented access checks and made sure that accessibility was built into the architecture of everything we did.

Last question! What advice would you give aspiring female filmmakers who may be discouraged by the current state of the film industry?

Some of the most exciting and innovative films and artworks arise from incredibly challenging conditions. Focus on the guiding intention or question behind the work and what you want to offer. Consider collective filmmaking strategies, alternative ways of organizing labor, resource sharing, and work with the tools that are available to you.