Evidence

At the intersection of American politics, its ideas about the family and the right wing’s deliberate assault on autonomy, I use my experience of family to look at the way we live within ideology and how ideas about the family shape and limit the idea of care.

With her fourth feature-length film, Lee Anne Schmitt delivers her most intimate and undoubtedly her most incisive work – a political meditation that intertwines family history, a critique of capitalism and an analysis of the neo-conservative movement in the United States.
Daughter of an Olin Corporation employee, the filmmaker questions the legacy of this American firm specialised in chemical and munitions manufacturing. On the one hand, the ecological disaster caused by former industrial sites that heavily polluted the surrounding areas; on the other, the John M. Olin Foundation, which in over thirty years invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the rise of the conservative movement and lastingly redefined American politics and the debates on women’s rights, bodily autonomy and children’s education. Schmitt confronts these two realities to reveal how hidden financing has shaped the reactionary ideological landscape. She also explores how economic power worms its way into intimacy, even into the stories that have structured her own family and her conceptions of motherhood. 
Shot in 16 mm and backed by Jeff Parker’s jazz compositions, this essay-film takes the form of an inquiry that associates documents, contaminated areas and family archives. Lee Anne Schmitt clear-sightedly and modestly weaves a reflection on memory, the complexity of the present and the uncertainty of the future, whilst also affirming through her story that a kind of resistance against disinformation and the current political climate is possible.

Nepheli Gambade