I Stare at You and Dream

This is an intimate, deeply personal look at the lives of four characters caught in the everyday melodrama of life and longing in Los Angeles. Filmmaker Susan Mogul approaches the documentation of neighborhood life both as an outsider who has kept a distinctively New York/Jewish sensibility and as an insider at home with a city and its people. New York-transplant Susan has been living in Los Angeles’ Highland Park district for years. She began documenting life on her block, painting a warm, colorful portrait of a friendly blue-collar neighborhood. In I STARE AT YOU AND DREAM, Mogul introduces us to her best friend Rosie Sanchez, who runs a family Mexican-American restaurant. Also central is Rosie’s daughter Alejandra, a spirited, intelligent teenager who is a hip-hop poet by night. Ray Aguilar is the charming, thoughtful and enigmatic man with whom the filmmaker enjoys an on-and-off romance. As they struggle against solitude and societal pressures, Mogul and her friends reach out to one another and redefine family in a modern urban context.

Since 1973, artist/filmmaker Susan Mogul, has developed a body of work that is autobiographical, diaristic, and ethnographic. Her early videos of the 1970's are featured in contemporary courses, exhibitions, and films, that examine the history of video art and the history of feminist art. Mogul's recent documentaries: Everyday Echo Street (1993), Home Safe Home (1997), and I Stare at You and Dream (1997) - produced in association with ITVS with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting- have all been broadcast on public television. Mogul has also received numerous grants, fellowships and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Ford Foundation, the California Council for the Humanities and other institutions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Anthology Film Archive, Video Data Bank, Long Beach Museum of Art, Duke University, Folkwang Museum and the American Film Institute. FILMOGRAPHY Dressing Up (7 min., 1973) Take Off (7 min., 1974) Dear Dennis (4 min., 1988) Five East (15 min., 1990) We Draw - You Video (26 min., 1991) Prosaic Portraits, Ironies and Other Intimacies (46 min., 1991) Everyday Echo Street; A Summer Diary ( 30 min., 1993) Home Safe Home (6 min., 1997)