Sharon Lockhart's FILMS

Pódworka, 2009  16 mm film transferred to HD, 31 minutes

Sharon Lockhart’s film, Pódworka, takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Lodz, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Lodz’ courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the overdetermined playgrounds of America, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city of Lodz, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children’s world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood.

Antoine/Milena

16mm color/sound film transferred to HD, 2015 

3:28 minutes

Rudzienko, 2016 HD, 56 minutes

Sharon Lockhart’s film Rudzienko was shot over two years in collaboration with the residents of the Youth Center for Socio therapy in Rudzienko, Poland. Building on the relationship she established in 2009 with Milena, who later moved to the center, Lockhart conceived of a series of workshops to empower the young women. The group worked together to develop dialog and movements to be enacted on camera based on their collective activities. The resulting film features a range of conversations, from the philosophical to everyday teenage concerns, and depicts actions both theatrical and mundane that voice the girls’ rich humanity. The Polish-language film proposes an innovative approach to the relationship between image and language by offsetting the spoken conversations with their written translations.

Little Review, 2017 HD, 27 minutes

Little Review is a precisely composed filmic portrait of the girls of the Youth Center for Socio therapy in Rudzienko, Poland. Suggesting an abstract translation of the eponymous publication, the film comprises three acts and a satirical prologue performed by the young women evoking the resilient and candid spirit of Korczak’s newspaper. Set against a black background that refuses a single context, the scenes are resonant of the history of a diverse group of practices in both the visual and performing arts. Given this space to be seen and heard, the young women, like Korczak’s writers, command performances full of nuance and self-possession. The nearly hypnotic repetition of the English words “trust,” “hate,” “love,” and “hope” in the first scene is followed by a deconstructed piano solo. Considered together with the tableaux of energetic movement in extreme slow motion in the final sequence, the young women’s actions can be seen as allegories of adolescence, evoking challenges both individual and universal.