St. Tula's Blessings is a five-part moving-image work that occupies the space between fiction and nonfiction. By marrying documentary methods, performance, observational footage, and animation St. Tula’s Blessings resists clear distinctions between observation and fabrication.

 

I move between observational footage, animation, and performance without treating those forms as fundamentally different from one another. I'm interested in the ways people adjust themselves when they know they're being filmed, the ways translation reshapes what someone means, and the ways animation can carry experiences that the camera never recorded. These choices don't move away from documentary for me; they are an aid to what documentary is already doing. 

​

The five parts share an interest in the small negotiations that happen whenever someone tries to understand another person. Each film approaches that question differently, but all of them begin from the assumption that meaning is made collaboratively: between filmmaker and participant, between speaker and listener, and eventually between the film and the person watching it.