Recipient of a 2025 JFI Discretionary Grant
Earth Camp One tells the story of how I lost five family members in a decade. At 12, I attended the Northern California hippie summer camp Earth Camp One. My parents seemed deeply unhappy: I thought going there would save me. We often want to break away from our families: what happens when they leave us? The film is about the search for joy – including queer joy – as an antidote for loss. How does personal grief intersect with shared losses that drive social change, and how does making art inform both? Working with visual and audio archives, narration, and hybrid elements like drag and dance, Earth Camp One asks: how can we live in a world where everything and everyone disappears?
Description provided by grantee.
Jennie Livingston's film Paris is Burning won a Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1991, and in 2022, New York Times critic A.O. Scott named it one of his ten best films of all time. Livingston’s short films include Through the Ice (2005); Hotheads (1994); and Who’s the Top? (2005). Jennie was a consulting producer and a director on the FX series Pose (2017-2019), and created a video for Elton John’s live show that ran 2011-2018. Livingston went to Yale, where they received the Sudler Prize for work in visual art. Fellowships include a Guggenheim fellowship and four MacDowell residencies. Jennie has taught at Yale, Connecticut College, and Brooklyn College and writes fiction screenplays and journalism: in 2024, they wrote on film and performance art for the New York Times Magazine and T Magazine, and gave virtual talks to audiences in Hong Kong and Kyiv.