An experimental documentary about the street drag racing scene on Chicago’s near West Side. This is a rambling textured film about obsession. It is about the mythos of speed for its own sake, but it’s also about waiting, and it is through waiting that The BLVD exposes community, inner-city landscapes and nomadic experiences of place. The film treats storytelling as a living medium for determining history. And it commands respect, for those who transform cars, or anything else, through passion.
Filmmaker Deborah Stratman works in a territory between experimental and documentary genres. In her films and frequent work in other media, including drawing, sculpture, sound, photography and small press, she explores the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes, from Muslim Xinjiang China to suburban southern California. Her recent work addresses American constructs of Freedom, the junction between technology and faith and contemporary locations of the supernatural. Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Stratman was the subject of a mid-career retrospective,The Thing Unnamed, at MoMA New York in 2013.