The Ties That Bind is a dialogue with her mother, who lived through the rise of Nazism, the war years and the allied occupation, during which she met her husband, a US soldier, in an astonishing archive montage. An intimate yet collective story that reflects on the impregnations of racism and totalitarianism, where questions of the past raise their head in the present.
The Odds of Recovery is one of her most radically autobiographical films. After undergoing six operations in her lifetime, Su Friedrich dwells on the last to explore therapeutically her doubts and anxieties, and to investigate the functioning of medical institutions that are incapable of treating certain illnesses, in contrast with the bodily affectations and transformations they activate in the patient.
The Ties That Bind, 1984, 16 mm, 55 min
The Odds of Recovery, 2002, 16 mm and digital, 65 min
Copies courtesy of Light Cone. Catalan subtitles.
A programme by Gonzalo de Lucas.
