EVIDENCE is both an analysis of corporate spending and the impact of dark money on U.S. politics and ideology and a personal meditation on ideas of family and care.
The film is a meditation on the intersection of American politics, ideas of family, and the right wing’s intentional assault on bodily autonomy. This is my fourth feature: each an examination of ideology and its construction in the United States.
This film is by far my most personal work and attempts to understand how my own family (of birth and of choice) was sculpted within a mythology of capitalism.
My father worked for thirty years for a petrochemical company. In 1969, two years before I was born, the son of the company’s founder formed a foundation which, over thirty-five years, spent more than 350 million dollars in support of the creation of the new conservative movement. Using an archive of funded materials, landscapes of the company’s manufacturing sites (many of which are now environmental clean-up sites) and personal, domestic imagery the film meditates on the impact of corporate money on our ideas of care and family, as well as the link between the right wing’s assault on bodily autonomy and the crisis of the environment.
The film also looks at the link between humans and the natural world; the Olin Corporation has one of the most egregious environmental histories in the United States. EVIDENCE looks at the primacy of place and the body, and the varied meanings of survival.
The music in the film is, like that of my last film, composed by my partner, Jazz Composer and guitarist Jeff Parker.
Lee Anne Schmitt
