Marinella Senatore

About Face

Marinella Senatore’s film, Variations, redefines each stage of traditional cinema production. The artist cast a group of New York City residents with no previous acting experience and facilitated a collaborative process of writing, directing and filming. The film draws on the character of the Lower East Side for its subject matter and physical location and evokes the language of the serial in its four episodes, each of which elaborates on the theme of the neighborhood from a different perspective. The footage in the film documents both its own filmmaking process and a series of fictional stories about the neighborhood, recording the interchange between community members that occurred during filming.