American Flags (2011)

Inspired by the diary/notebook films of Jonas Mekas and Marie Menken, American Flags (Dir. Zoë

Inspired by the diary/notebook films of Jonas Mekas and Marie Menken, American Flags (Dir. Zoë Heyn-Jones) casts a glance at the flag-saturated landscape of America seen through Canadian eyes. Between foreign and domestic, the extraordinary and the banal, American Flags invokes ideas of autoethnography, experimental geography, home movies, nostalgia, naïveté, and the legacy/genealogy of experimental film in New York City. Informed by Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, the strange notion of claiming land by planting a flag is considered through social positionality and art practice informed by Indigenous land rights and solidarity.