Speculation Nation, Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown, 75 min, USA/Spain 2014
In this impressionistic documentary film, Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown travel across Spain to explore the consequences of the housing crisis. What they find are Spanish citizens, inspired by the politics of The 15M Movement and Occupy Wall Street, who are mobilizing, collectivizing, and fighting for the right for a decent place to live. Along the way, the filmmakers visit young mothers and their families squatting in failed condo developments; intentional communities of mountain cave dwellers; protest campsites that have sprung up in front of bank branches; and empty apartment buildings transformed into experiments in utopian living. The film examines the ideologies that separate housing from home, and real estate speculation from speculations about a better way to live.
Bill Brown is a writer and filmmaker living in North Carolina where he is a lecturing fellow in the Arts of the Moving Image Program at Duke University. He received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In his work, Bill is interested in landscapes as markers of our memories, dreams, and desires.
Bill’s films have screened at venues around the world, including the Viennale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Grant and a Rockefeller Fellowship.
Sabine Gruffat is a digital media artist and filmmaker living and working in North Carolina. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
Sabine’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival and Migrating Forms in New York. Her feature film I Have Always Been A Dreamer has screened internationally including at the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. She has also produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
