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Stream of Life

Over 25 years, artist-filmmaker Marc Lafia has created a kaleidoscopic body of work blending narrative films, installations, and intimate family archives. In collaboration with writer-editor Kala Mandrake, Stream of Life unfolds as a poetic manifesto, dissolving the boundaries between art and life, fiction and reality. Described by filmmaker Alan Berliner as “a majestic and operatic film that transforms private archives into a universal meditation on time, love, and human vulnerability,” the film reflects on how recording shapes modern identity. Through inventive refrains and intimate encounters, Lafia captures the rhythms of relationships and the fluidity of memory. At its heart, Stream of Life is a love story—layered, complex, and deeply moving. It is a love story between Lafia and his wife, Irena; a love story about his family, in all their ebullient, moody, and brilliant sweetness; and a love story with cinema itself.

  • Marc Lafia
    Director
    Scenes from a Private Life, 14 screen installation, 69 films, 2024 Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else, HD Video, 140mins, 2022 Twenty-Seven, HD Video, 88 mins, 2016 Revolution of the Present, HD video, 81 mins, 2013-15 Hi, How are You Guest 10497, HD video, 67mins, 2012 Raindrop Ecstasy, 3 screen HD video installation, Shanghai Minsheng Museum, 7 minutes, 2011 Double Fantasy, Video diptych, Shanghai Minsheng Museum, 18 min, 2011-2013 Revolution of Everyday Life, HD feature, 72 mins, 2010 Paradise, HD video, 78 mins, 2009 Love and Art, SD Video, 70 mins, 2008 My Double My Self, SD Video 2008 Oldham Ahead, 7 screen installation, Canary Islands Architectural Biennale, 23 minutes, 2007 Harry, Zelda and Antoinette, three screen computational film, 47 mins, 2005 Permutations, 365 multi-screen computational films, 2005 Ziggy Timber (Talk Show), SD video 64 mins, 2004 Computations, computational films 2001-2003 Confessions of an Image, DV, 43 mins, 2002 Exploding Oedipus, 35mm, 81 mins, 2001
  • Marc Lafia
    Writer
  • Kala Mandrake
    Writer
    The Brainwashing of My Dad (2015) Mandrake the Magician 2020
  • Kala Mandrake
    Editor
  • Marc Lafia
    Producer
  • Irena Rogovsky
    Producer
  • Marc Lafia
    Key Cast
    "Marc Lafia"
  • Irena Rogovsky
    Key Cast
    "Irena Rogovsky"
  • Lola Lafia
    Key Cast
    "Lola Lafia "
  • Roman Lafia
    Key Cast
    "Roman Lafia "
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Feature
  • Genres:
    Documentarry, Fiction
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 41 minutes 49 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 10, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    100,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States, United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, Cambodia, China, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, South Africa, Thailand, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • none
Distribution Information
  • Marc Lafia
    Country: United States
Director Biography - Marc Lafia

Marc Lafia works with photography, film, performance, installation and drawing. As network culture changed the pervasiveness of image circulation Lafia would proffer a new sense of imaging and photography, an image continually transmuted and transmitted, an image in circulation. With his series Permutations and Computations he was an early innovator of computational cinema. With his seven very independent features he rethought what it was to make a new cinema of intimacy and the everyday. His sprawling installations and performances would bring embodiment to his philosophy of art as an event and his drawings the immediacy of the line as sensual expression. He has been exhibited and in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, screened at Anthology Film Archives, The ICC Tokyo, International Film Festival Rotterdam and invited to participate in the Biennial of Architecture, Art and Landscape of the Canaries, 2007, The 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale 2014 and The Guangzhou Triennial, 2023.

He has taught at Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Pratt Institute and Columbia University. He is the author of Image Photograph (2015), Everyday Cinema (2017)The Event of Art (2020) and the forthcoming book Notes on Performance (2025) all on punctum books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lafia

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Director Statement

Long form narrative fiction is a very particular form. How to make such film speak, from the very way it articulates its self, the way it moves and comes alive from the inside. What happens when you turn the camera on and speak to it, perform for it, let it observe you, and let you observe others in recording? What is this space that recording permits? How do we come to know ourselves? How to live in our world of ubiquitous recording? How can we reveal ourselves to ourselves more intimately in performing for these recordings? And with that let’s ask how can film be a medium for self-discovery, a way of negotiating existence within an ever-surveilled, media-saturated reality? In this sense film and recording is not just an act of documentation but a process of self-revelation, self knowing, performance.

I seem always to want to look at ways to explore and play with film language, its reading and recording and so am interested in conceptual approaches to the problems of how to make a film, technically, conceptually, financially, how to find an audience for the work. What is this thing we call film and recording? Of course it is a business: cinema, Tik Tok, instagram. These are also forms, techniques, languages, collective and plastic languages.

With Stream of Life (2025), myself and editor Kala Mandrake want to weave together a quarter-century of my family’s digital film archive (home movies if you like) with my narrative films and performances. In doing this I want to not just blur the lines between documentary and fiction, but to emphasize how cinema and theatre help us reveal ourselves to ourselves, help us to enact our hurt and desire, and in this see the fluid boundaries between life and art, private and public, the intimate and the networked.