Young aspiring artists are stereotypically told they have to go "elsewhere" to be successful: head to big cities, to the coasts, to go anywhere but where they came from. In counterpoint, Tony Buba and Richard Myers have each created a lifetime of work that is unrepentantly rooted in their own, original home places. Immersed in their locales with an intimacy that is built upon lived experience, their films resonate well beyond the limiting label of "regionalism." Their unique visions, immersed in family, friends, community, imagination, and fantasy suggest that staying home might just provide infinite possibilities for delving into personal and public cinematic explorations of the highest order.
Washing Walls with Mrs. G.
USA | 1980 | 6 | digital file
"Every year I washed walls for my grandmother. When my grandmother was 87, I made this video while washing her walls. The camera person was Nick Mastandrea, who has gone on to be one of the top A.D.s in Hollywood. Nick never shot anything before this and he said what do I do. I told him don't pan, tilt or zoom, just keep my grandmother in the frame." - Tony Buba
USA | 1985 | 5 | digital file
Tony Buba has a dilemma: raise a lot of money and make a feature documentary about the Braddock Food Bank, or raise a lot of money and just give it to the Food Bank. Which is better? You vote: Food or Film?
USA | 1974 | 60 | digital file
Richard Myers's epic films were among the memorable highlights of the Ann Arbor Film Festival in the 1970s and 80s. Always an unique and idiosyncratic visionary, Myers's work is indelibly immersed in dual geographies: one the actual landscape of his lifetime spent in and around Kent, Ohio, and the other, a surreal dreamscape of fantasies, fears, memories, and obsessions.
Richard Myers on 37-73: "I was born in 1937, and the film was shot mostly in 1973. It begins with a song from my childhood that all the kids who lived around my father's beer joint used to sing: 'Lemonade, lemonade, five cents a glass. If you don't like it, stick it up your ask me no questions, tell me no lies, if you fall in a bucket of shit be sure and close your eyes.'"