“The Story of the Borderlands Is Not Singular”: Cathy Lee Crane on Drawing the Line

Filmmaker last interviewed veteran multimedia artist Cathy Lee Crane about her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front, which combined staged performances and archival footage from the National Archives in DC to present the strange but true entanglement of a WWI German saboteur with the progressive labor movement of activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. While Crane’s latest selection of works likewise resurrects buried US history, they tread territory even further back in time, all the way down to the border, and are currently being shown a continent away. Throughout the month of July, the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin will be showcasing several projects from their second American artist-in-residence (Kevin B. Lee was the inaugural invitee), including Crane’s multi-platform hybrid series Drawing the Line, a 14-channel work in progress that travels from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean to grapple with what the 19th century US and Mexico Border Survey Commission has wrought. To learn all about this sprawling mosaic that combines “staging, interviews, observational documentary, sonic records, and the archive in collaboration with those living in the shadow of the Commission’s arbitrary line” — as well as the feature-length doc Crossing Columbus (2020) and the short film Terrestrial Sea (2022) — Filmmaker reached out once again to the globetrotting (2013) Guggenheim Fellow.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.