Blending live action staged as if in a dollhouse with rarely seen archival footage from the National Archives, the fantastically true story of how America entered WWI is told. Through vibrant historical characters like labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and German naval officer Franz von Rintelen this loose adaptation of John dos Passos’ 42nd Parallel, explores the timeless issues of radical labor politics and the domestic effects of war.
Since 1994, Cathy Lee Crane has crafted a body of work that mines the historical archive to produce lyrical films of speculative history. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 in recognition for her unique re-combinations of archival and staged material. Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) was supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. It premiered at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema as a “gem of world cinema”. Crane received the first survey of her work in 2015 as part of the American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. Six of her award-winning short films are distributed on 16mm by Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. Crane's first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front (2018) premiered at SFIndie Fest to rave reviews. Film theorist Noel Burch has called it “a masterpiece”. Since 2017, her ongoing work on the US/Mexico border, funded by the El Paso Community Foundation’s Border Arts Residency and the Creative Arts Fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center has produced numerous iterations of its cross-platform design: Crossing Columbus (2020) a feature-length documentary awarded Best Feature Documentary at the Syracuse International Film Festival, terrestrial sea (2022) a short film awarded a Jury Citation from the Festival de Cinema da Fronteira in Brazil and presented as part of the (X)-trACTION collective she co-founded in 2020 with artists Jason Livingston, Laurie McKenna, Nicole Antebi, and Erin Wilkerson. As the 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin, she presented a 14-channel sculptural installation work-in-progress Drawing the Line from which two diptychs have been produced for NOW!Journal and as part of the Video Art Section at El Kazma (Gabes, Tunisia) in 2023. Crane is a Professor of Film at Ithaca College.