Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

With her incredibly auspicious debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the acclaimed multimedia performance artist Miranda July makes the leap to feature filmmaking with such skill and original vision it’s hard not to feel a tremor of excitement. A new voice in American cinema has arrived.

July’s film is a poetic and penetrating observation of how people struggle to connect with one another in an isolating and contemporary world. Christine Jesperson (July herself) is a lonely artist and eldercab driver who uses her fantastical artistic visions to draw her aspirations and objects of desire closer to her. Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a newly single shoe salesman and father of two boys, is prepared for amazing things to happen. But when he meets the captivating Christine, he panics. Life is not so oblique for Richard’s 7-year-old Robby, who is having a risqué Internet romance with a stranger, and his 14-year-old brother Peter, who becomes the guinea pig for neighborhood girls practicing for their future of romance and marriage.

In July’s modern world, the mundane is transcendent, and everyday people become radiant characters who speak their innermost thoughts, act on secret impulses, and experience truthful human moments that at times approach the surreal. They seek togetherness through tortuous routes and find redemption in the small moments that connect them to someone else on earth.— Shari Frilot, Sundance Film Festival.

Miranda July makes movies, performances, recordings and combinations of these things. Her short movies ( Haysha Royko, The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Getting Stronger Every Day) have been screened internationally at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. Nest of Tens and a sound installation, The Drifters, were presented in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. July participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with learningtoloveyoumore.com, created with support from the Creative Capital foundation and in collaboration with artist Harrell Fletcher. July’s multi-media performances (Love Diamond, The Swan Tool, How I Learned to Draw) have been presented at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and The Kitchen in New York. July’s stories can be read in The Paris Review and The Harvard Review and her radio performances can be heard regularly on NPR’s The Next Big Thing.

A resident of Portland for nearly 10 years before relocating to Los Angeles to shoot Me and You and Everyone We Know, we are please to welcome her back and excited to have this opportunity to see her new work.