In Order Not To Be Here

An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. An isolation-based fear (protect us from people not like us). A fear of irregularity (eat at McDonalds, you know what to expect). A fear of thought (turn on the television). A fear of self (don’t stop moving). By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st Century hollowness… an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.

Original electronic music by Kevin Drumm.

“In an interview a few years ago, experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman listed Barbara Loden and Jon Jost among her key influences, and the impact of both these diffident figures, icons in an increasingly evanescent hardcore avant-garde filmmaking tradition, is evident in Stratman’s latest film [that] continues her forbears’ tendency to bring cheerfully enigmatic formal verve to their scornful disdain of American hypocrisy. Stratman’s film employs the codes of surveillance footage--black-and-white images shot from a helicopter at night, for example — to question notions of personal safety, next to the frightening facts of an increasingly omniscient, panoptic government. The filmmaker deftly mobilizes our fears as the vulnerable inhabitants of peaceful homes that attract thieves and crazed ax murderers, while at the same time prompting worries about encroachments on civil liberties… This uneasy but graceful combination is no easy feat!”

— Holly Willis, LA Weekly