Linefork

An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains. Now well into his eighties, Lee Sexton is the last living link to the distant past of a regional American music. A retired coal miner with black lungs, Lee and his wife, Opal, continue to farm the land where he was born. Together they face encroaching health concerns and stark economic realities. Recorded over three years, Linefork is an observational film documenting their marriage, their community, their resilience, and the raw yet delicate music of an unheralded banjo legend, linked to the past yet immediately present.

Jeff Silva

Jeff Silva is an American filmmaker and anthropologist who has worked at leading American schools and universities, including the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Trained in cinema and visual arts in the US with a Ph.D. from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Silva humanistically and sensorially combines artistic practices with social science research. He has made four feature films and several shorts, all of which have to do with the fragility of individuals in the midst of turbulent social contexts. His films have been shown in festivals including Visions du Réel, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, The Viennale, BAFICI, Doclisboa, Open City Documentary Festival. He is now based in Marseille leading the documentary cinema branch of La fabrique des écritures ethnographiques.

Vic Rawlings

Vic Rawlings  is a musician, instrument builder, sound installation artist, filmmaker, and freelance teacher based in western Massachusetts. Rawlings is active as an electroacoustic musician, most often using an amplified/prepared cello and an electronic instrument of his own design and build. Visiting artist/teaching residencies have included Oberlin Conservatory, MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Wesleyan. His teaching interests include listening actions, collective sound-based improvisation, and electroacoustic instrument building, as well as more conventional forms of music (electric and acoustic guitar/banjo/mandolin) ranging widely in style.