Sanctuary Station

About This Screening

Sanctuary Station traces a series of encounters with women and youth who have cultivated intrinsic attachments to the various life forms that inhabit the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. Oscillations between the desire for solitude and the need for collaboration recur through an album-like progression of personal stories and actions. These encounters are framed through the poems of Mary Norbert Körte (1934-2022), an ex-nun who built her own cabin deep in the forest, adjacent to a former logging railroad. Körte’s life and work bear witness to the daily phenomena of internal and external experience. Depictions of ongoing forest defense movements, collective and personal rites of mourning, and intimate everyday routines evoke cycles of life unfolding within this intricately interwoven environment.

“Shot on high-contrast black-and-white 16mm film and Super 16, this incandescent work continues Brigid McCaffrey’s ongoing portraiture of individuals who seek anarchic communion with their adopted land, weaving a rough, hallucinatory patchwork of encounters with women, old and young, solitary and collective, who live or work among the wildlife of the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. Through voiceover, the women share intimate observations of their primeval environment alongside personal stories of self-revelation, abstention, and conviction. These gradually merge in choral-like meditation, led by the richly timbred voice of the late poet Mary Norbert Körte, an ex-nun and Beat associate.”

-Museum of the Moving Image

Brigid McCaffrey is a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker whose work documents environments and people in states of flux. Her films explore extremes of autonomy and coexistence experienced by individuals who have distinct relationships with the land. Often taking shape as nuanced portraits, the films respond to the physical and emotional changes of their subjects while fusing representations of self and place.

She has exhibited at venues such as the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Harvard Film Archive, the New York Film Festival - Projections, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, among others. Her work was presented by Ballroom Marfa for the 2015 edition of Artists’ Film International and she was a featured artist at the 2016 Flaherty Seminar. McCaffrey was named a Guggenheim fellow in Film & Video in 2019.