Institute History
Description
With her incredibly auspicious debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the acclaimed multimedia performance artist Miranda July makes the leap to feature filmmaking with such skill and original vision it's hard not to feel a tremor of excitement. A new voice in American cinema has arrived.
July's film is a poetic and penetrating observation of how people struggle to connect with one another in an isolating and contemporary world. Christine Jesperson (July herself) is a lonely artist and eldercab driver who uses her fantastical artistic visions to draw her aspirations and objects of desire closer to her. Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a newly single shoe salesman and father of two boys, is prepared for amazing things to happen. But when he meets the captivating Christine, he panics. Life is not so oblique for Richard's 7-year-old Robby, who is having a risqué Internet romance with a stranger, and his 14-year-old brother Peter, who becomes the guinea pig for neighborhood girls practicing for their future of romance and marriage.
In July's modern world, the mundane is transcendent, and everyday people become radiant characters who speak their innermost thoughts, act on secret impulses, and experience truthful human moments that at times approach the surreal. They seek togetherness through tortuous routes and find redemption in the small moments that connect them to someone else on earth.
(Archives note: see also Miranda July's Meet The Artist interview on our YouTube Channel.)