This page contains links to articles, interviews, and videos that can be incorporated into your syllabus in preparation for an event or afterward for post-event discussion and research. Go to saic.edu/cate for detailed event information.
Su Friedrich: SINK OR SWIM and RULES OF THE ROAD
Thursday, September 7, 6:00 p.m.
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Su Friedrich: TODAY
Thursday, September 7, 8:30 p.m.
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Please note that All CATE events will have real-time captioning (CART). Hearing loops, wheelchair seating, and companion seating are also available at the Gene Siskel Film Center. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
For nearly a half-century, Su Friedrich has played a pivotal role in American queer cinema and autobiographical film, with her rich and often unflinching explorations of family, kinship, and society. Her landmark featurette SINK OR SWIM (1990) is a wrenching portrait of a girl’s fraught relationship with her father, unspooling in a series of twenty-six evocative and interlocking vignettes. Friedrich presents the film with her wry breakup short RULES OF THE ROAD (1993) and discusses her process.
Su Friedrich presents her latest feature, a luminous personal essay on beauty, love, and loss. Endeavoring to live by and also question the maxim to “live in the moment,” Friedrich turns her camera to the world immediately in front of her: a neighborhood barbeque, a bucolic landscape, and the devastating losses of loved ones.
Su Friedrich has produced more than 20 films and videos since 1978. She is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, a Herb Alpert Award, as well as numerous grants from the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Independent Television Service. Her work is widely screened in the United States, Canada, and Europe and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rotterdam International Film Festival; the London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival; the Stadtkino,Vienna; The Cinematheque, Vancouver; the National Film Theater, London; the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema; the New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival; the first Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; the Cork International Film Festival; the Wellington Film Festival; the Bios art center, Athens; and the Anthology Film Archives, New York. Friedrich taught film and video production at Princeton University from 1998–2023.
Su Friedrich: Breaking the Rules [Chapter]
Janet Cutler, Chapter Author | Robin Blaetz, Editor | Women's Experimental Cinema | 2007
A Conversation with Su Friedrich [Article]
Jacob Mertens | Film Matters, Vol. 4 (1) | p. 58-64 | 2013
Su Friedrich Reflects On 30 Years Of ‘Sink Or Swim’ [Interview]
Robert Delany | Split Tooth Media | October 2, 2020
Su Friedrich’s Today [Article]
Jasmine Liu | The Brooklyn Rail | May 2023
From Zygote to Global Cinema Via Su Friedrich’s Films [Article]
Scott MacDonald | Journal of Film and Video Vol. 44 (1/2) | p. 30-41 | 1992
Script of ‘Sink or Swim’
Scott MacDonald | Screen Writings | p.225-258 | 2020
Su Friedrich: An Interview
Gently Down the Stream by 