In the summer of 2020, I had the great pleasure of scripting the audio description track for Sasha Wortzel’s film This is an Address, read by Tourmaline. The film is an address about a place that didn’t have an address, an encampment on the Gansevoort Peninsula on the far west side of lower Manhattan where Sylvia Rivera lived with others who are often left out of narratives of gay liberation.
It was a rare and wonderful opportunity to collaborate with an artist who wanted the audio description to be an extension of the artwork. This meant thinking carefully about how to describe the intentional collapse of two different time periods represented in the film. We developed a timeline format in a Google Doc that allowed us to map the visuals and the audio independently so we could place the description track where it wouldn’t compete too intensely with the audio and score by Geo Wyeth.
The film was released by Field of Vision in October 2020 and can be experienced here.