You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born (2019), streaming from Wednesday, July 21 through Tuesday, August 3, 2021.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually rich film that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 1970s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor. Her life is told through voice-over, narrated by performers who range in age from nine to sixty-nine, and is beautifully illustrated with images of animals (including humans), insects, and landscapes. Film theorist Eli Horwatt writes “You Were an Amazement… conveys how the human animal’s ineluctable death drive can be the source of both profound comedy and tragic cruelty. In the many stories relayed across this short but voluble film, viewers are invited into an intimate identification with the experiences of marginalized others.”

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is presented here as one of five films in Part Three | Interrelational Arrangements (Interdependency and Survival), the third of four programs in the online series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.