October Country

While I was in the Bay Area last week (friends’ wedding, not MLA), I saw Lawrence Rinder’s picks for the best art of 2008 in the Bay Guardian. Number 2 was Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country, a documentary about Donal’s family in upstate New York, which he shot over several years of visits home at Halloween. Donal and Michael moved from San Francisco to Portland about the same time we did; I met them when they kindly agreed to host our hard-to-house Neo-Benshi Cabaret in their upstairs studio last spring (downstairs were the instruments they used to make the soundtrack). The movie had a work-in-progress showing in New York last fall; the final edit premieres this year. You can see some of Donal’s stills from the Mohawk Valley here.