Shulamit Nazarian
2021 – Present
Produced by Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles & Amuletos Projects
Directed, Lensed and Edited by Amada Torruella & Seth Gadsden
Series Producer, Seth Curcio
A series of short art docs for the Los Angeles based gallery.
Vena Lab
2021 – Present
A series of film & storytelling workshops including documentary co-productions with communities, collectives, and organizations in rural El Salvador.
A production of Amuletos Projects (U.S./El Salvador) and a co-production of NODD (El Salvador)
Focusing on communities at the frontlines of environmental crisis and extractivism in El Salvador, Vena Lab is a field-building, impact strategy focused on using storytelling tools and the documentary process to empower communities, seed social change and contribute to a more rich and equitable media landscape.
Developed thanks to an active network of community partnerships, Vena Lab embraces long-term collaboration and mentorship in focus communities. Access to professional equipment and media literacy drive the mission to support sustainable growth and documentary infrastructures.
Los Amuletos Migran
Released: 2019
Running Time: 8 mins
Directed & Produced by Amada Torruella & Seth Gadsden
Edited by Maria Luisa Santos
El Salvador, U.S.A
Commissioned by the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles
In July 1980, nineteen year old Dora Rodríguez fled her native El Salvador and crossed the US/Mexico border. In Los Amuletos Migran, we accompany Dora while she looks through migrants’ personal belongings, which were seized and discarded by Ajo Border Patrol agents and collected from the trash by a janitor and local photographer, Tom Kiefer. These objects echo their owners’ spirits and harness the power of collective memory. As Dora recalls details of her journey, she becomes aware of the protection that was given to her by the items she carried during her trek north.
The Source | Complex Keys
Released: 2019
Running Time: 5 mins
Directed, Produced and Edited by Seth Gadsden
Music by Ted Hearne
Text by Mark Doten
Complex Keys is an experimental music video in collaboration with Ted Hearne featuring his album “The Source.” The protagonist is Chelsea Manning, the US Army Private who infamously leaked hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks and their media partners in 2010.
“‘The Source’ prompts dinner table conversation. It offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism – film and television have that covered – but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.”
— Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
This composition of found footage detached from a human perspective explores and approximates the contrasting landscapes of Manning’s birth state of Oklahoma and the Greater Middle East where they were stationed with the U.S. military. Tornadoes, drones, vast deserts, explosions, suburban grids and minaret-dotted landscapes offer an increasingly agitated and disturbed look into conflict. The intermixing landscapes distorted on screen evoke the anxieties induced by the open, unfiltered access and exchange of disturbing, disconnected and often personal media shared online.
The music is composed from a litany of primary sources including Twitter feeds, cable news interviews, chat transcripts and declassified military reports. The text of this data-obsessed new work culled and arranged by librettist Mark Doten, sets Manning’s words and sections of the classified material known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary. The Source premiered at the 2014 BAM Next Wave Festival, performed at LA Opera and San Francisco Opera, and was released as an album on New Amsterdam Records in October 2015.