SYNOPSIS & BIO
Posted on June 20, 2009 - Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
SYNOPSIS
THE MARINA EXPERIMENT is the result of over 10,000 photographs, super 8 home footage and reel to reel audio tape interrogations that director Marina Lutz’s father made of her during her upper class upbringing in 1960s and 1970s Manhattan. A both eerie and infinitely fascinating archive that she herself has now sorted out and reassembled. Her father’s transgressive voyeurism is turned against himself, while a courageous self portrait simultaneously grows out of the almost incestuously intimate ‘home movies’. The result is a family exposé that can’t be shaken off that easily, and which in an intelligent and absolutely unique way raises the question about the right to not be seen – a question that has become even more relevant in the present day.
THE MARINA EXPERIMENT is less an autobiographical portrait than it is an evidentiary review of a childhood spent under the persistent gaze of an obsessively voyeuristic parent. It explores the hazy boundary between the recording of priceless memories and the inflicting of emotional harm. What emerges is a coldly ironic and revelatory examination of material that the viewer will find compellingly repugnant and ethically challenging.
BIOGRAPHY
Marina Lutz is the only child of an obsessively voyeuristic and controlling New Yorker of Russian Jewish descent who married an Italian Fascist that named their first pet Benito. One of the first boxes Marina opened in her extensive archive contained her father’s Bar Mitzvah torah resting next to a swastika armband that belonged to her mother. Marina’s early years, spent on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, had all the outward appearances of comfort and privilege; she spent her holidays abroad and was educated at an exclusive private girls’ school, where she wrote a one sentence essay about her family: “I live alone, except for my mother and my father.” A spectacularly rebellious and promiscuous adolescence followed, set against the backdrop of New York’s burgeoning late ‘70’s punk scene. Years later, she wrote and performed A Play with Myself, a one-woman show that was accepted into competition at the NY International Fringe Festival. It was here that a friend of her family approached her with the words “Your father was a pedophile that should have been in prison and he was heavily indebted to the Mafia because he lived way beyond his means.” She turned and ran, believing she needed a camera to get the rest of the story, but the informant disappeared. She is an award-winning self-taught filmmaker, with her first film, The Marina Experiment, a documentary about her obsessively voyeuristic and controlling father.
FILMOGRAPHY
This is Marina’s first film. Except for a really short film she made in 2006 that no one ever saw: Vagina is for Lovers
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Marina Marina!
I just watched this with fascination and horror.
Never quite realized the extent of your experience growing up. Philip told me about the screening and then pointed me here. I just wanted to congratulate you for surviving and completing this work. It is a very important piece in the literature of abuse that I think should be seen by everyone who has survived abuse and everyone who is planning on having children.
BIG LOVE TO YOU!
David