Evidence

A meditation on dark money, family and ideology; my father worked for a petrochemical company his entire life. The son of the founder of that company started a family foundation in 1969, which spent more than 350 million dollars in support of the creation of a conservative counterintelligentsia. They funded hundreds of fellows, endowed faculty lines, were the main funder and originator of the Federalist Society, the Law and Economics movement, and much more. The film uses my families, both that of my birth and the one I have chosen to create, to look at the way we live within ideology, how ideas of family itself constructs and limits our ideas of care.

  • Lee Anne Schmitt
    Director
    California Company Town, Purge This Land, The Last Buffalo Hunt
  • Lee Anne Schmitt
    Writer
    California Company Town, Purge This Land, The Last Buffalo Hunt
  • Lee Anne Schmitt
    Producer
    California Company Town, Purge This Land, The Last Buffalo Hunt
  • Jeff Parker
    Music
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 15 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    September 24, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    20,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16x9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Lee Anne Schmitt

Lee Anne Schmitt is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She explores the juncture between fiction and documentary. All of her work begins with landscape, the experience of living in a particular place at a particular time, the phenomena of time and space, and the space between the ideology and include films on the history of the American Left (Awake and Sing, 2003), the logic of labor and use (California Company Town, 2006), cowboyism and trauma (The Last Buffalo Hunt, 2011) and the legacy of abolitionist John Brown (Purge This Land, 2018, whose title is taken from John Brown’s letter of 1859: ‘I…am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.’).
She has exhibited widely at venues that include MoMA NY, SF Moma, MCA, the Getty Museum, RedCat Theater, Northwest Film Society, Centre Pompidou and festivals such as Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, BAFICI and FID Marseilles. Schmitt is a recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Award, a MacDowell Fellow and was a Guggengeim Fellow in 2018.

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