Hemlock Forest (2016) weaves references to Mary Wollstonecraft, Chantal Akerman and Karl Ove Knausgaard with Moyra Davey’s own family stories. During the making of Hemlock Forest, Akerman took her own life. Her death soon engulfed Davey’s awareness, prompting a broader exploration of Akerman’s and her own biographies, amid more universal themes of compulsion, artistic production, life and its passing.Read More »
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In Les Goddesses, filmed almost entirely in the artist’s New York apartment, Moyra Davey draws parallels between her familial experience and the family of 18th-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
Leafing through postcards, book pages, and her own photographs as she talks, Davey reflects on varied approaches to photography and film, such as planned versus unscripted recording of reality and the passage from private to public realms with a camera. Davey punctuates her narration with thoughts on writing as she simultaneously listens to and recites a script based on her 2011 essay, “The Wet and the Dry.”Read More »