The Photo
Date: 1991 Running Time: 43:10 Editor: Jeanne Finley, Merle Mason Sound: Kevin Deal
Nomads at the 25th Door deals with the memory's construction of a homeland when a concrete one is lost, stolen, or left behind. The tape is divided into three chapters, structured around a series of interviews between the video-maker and Mickey Yates, a 22 year old woman serving a double life sentence in the Nevada Woman's Correctional Institution for the murder of her mother.
In chapter One, A Theater of Small Gestures, Yates interviews Finley about her Balkan home where she worked for a television station in Belgrade during the 1989-90 melt-down of the cold war. During that year, the videomaker also traveled to Bucharest with a friend who was going home for the first time in twenty-five years. In Chapter Two, Which Man Runs, Which Man Sits Still at Home?, Yates finally allows herself to be interviewed and speaks of her relationship to her home.
In Chapter Three, How Do I Leave My Sister, Yates interviews two of her friends and the three of them discuss the relationship of their homes inside and outside of prison, as well as their future homes after their release.
Finley interweaves evocative visual imagery and sound throughout these three chapters to establish relationships between the different narratives. The resonance created between the narratives serves as a document of the shifts between the individual and family, government and its people, the documented and the betrayed, as well as hopes for a permanent home and the fragility of memory.