I am pleased to have been accepted to the intensive pre-production lab at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art where I will prepare my experimental essay film on Pompeii called Dreaming in Red.

The red of Dionysus belongs to women, the color of blood and of fire. This documentary takes a personal journey to the red-walled murals of the mystery chamber, uncovered in Pompeii in 1912 and written about extensively by the female Jungian scholar Linda Fierz-David. She saw in these murals, which depict a woman’s descent into a dramatic Dionysian transformation, an allegory for female identifying individuation. In the first century, Firmicus Maternus stated that the mystery cults like the one depicted in the murals corrupted the state of Rome and led to its fall. These cults were predominately structured around rituals to trans-female gods and performed by women. Rome, and by extension Pompeii, is a mirror of the West. Therefore this work is a first in a series on the history of collectives that threaten existing power structures, leading to a point of personal and political rupture. An expansion of my short Vesuvius at Home (as featured on vdrome.org), Dreaming in Red begins with myself in childhood re-enacting The Fall of Pompeii for a VHS Camera, and then circumambulates like an unspooling film strip into other narratives, time periods, and moving image mediums that once interwoven will uncover the mysteries buried at the heart of Pompeii, Cinema, and the Self. The script is currently in development with contributions by Nor Hall, author of Those Women and publisher of Dreaming in Red: Reading the Women’s Dionysian Initiation Chamber in Pompeii.

Your contribution will enable me to attend the Documentary Lab and to bring a complex project one step closer to becoming a reality. 

Thanks to my fifteen years as a music video director and experimental filmmaker, I serve as a film consultant. I have had successful insights on pre and post-production for several film projects. I consider my work as an instructor to be similar, facilitating students in telling their own stories either from their personal media archive or personal experiences of climate change. I am offering my consulting/coaching services as a reward.  Please see reward tiers to the right.

Vesuvius at Home:

A Dream in Red:

What Happens to the Mountain:

Christin Turner is an experimental filmmaker who seeks to change our ideas of the past and honoring traditions with a new, more modern outlook. Her use of color & light is painterly, impressionistic and psychedelic. Her films have been featured on vdrome.org, Frieze, the Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Villa, IFFR, Karlovy-Vary, Ann Arbor, True/False Kurzfilm Winterthur, and Kurzfilmtage Hamburg, awarding her the De-Framed Prize. She has received the support of MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, Villa Sträuli, and Fondazione Morra in Naples.

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The Uniondocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Ridgewood, Queens, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. An intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Research & Development Lab is a space for projects to grow while in their earliest stages. When a project is still largely a concept or idea, the lab helps filmmakers solidify the ideas with efforts, assignments, and conversations around best practices for grounding the project in its early stages of writing. This moment of focus can help set up projects for success from these nascent beginnings all the way through from funding to production to distribution.