California Company Town
16mm color film; 76 minutes
leeanneschmitt@gmail.com

California Company Town, the much-anticipated essay film by Lee Anne Schmitt, casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise. A versatile multidisciplinary artist whose practice extends from film and performance to photography and writing, Schmitt is a member of the faculty of CalArts’ graduate Film Directing Program. She creates evocative, deeply felt works that consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual, including a series of cinematic investigations of the intersections of landscape with personal memory (Las Vegas, 2000), with the history of the American Left (Awake and Sing, 2003), and with urban development (The Wash, 2005).

Film Screenings; selected:
DocLisboa, Lisbon
Ambulante, Tijuana
Eau Claire Progressive Film Festival, Wisconsin
Union Theater, Milwaukee
Anthology Film Archive, New York
SCMS Conference, Los Angeles
Antimatter Film Festival, British Columbia
Valdavia International Film Festival, Chile
Girl and a Gun Conference, Paris
Alternativa Film Festival, Barcelona
Doc's Kingdom, Serpa
Cinema Planeta, Cuenavaca
Elles Tournent, Brussels
Le Petit Cinema, Brussels
Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver
RedCat Theater, Los Angeles
Museum of Modern Art, New York
International Documentary Film Festival of Marseilles, France
Rotterdam International Film Festival: The Netherlands
Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, California
Athens International Film Festival, Athens, Ohio
OVNI, Barcelona, Spain
Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, Iowa City
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Durham, North Carolina
SFS: Starting From Scratch, The Netherland
Big Muddy Film Festival, Carbondale, Illinois
CPHDOX, Copenhagen
Punto de Vista, Pamplona
Yukon International/Available Light, Yukon Territory
BAFICI, Buenos Aires
Cinema du Reel, Paris
Ljubljana Film Festival, Slovenia
Bradford Film Festival, Bradford
Jeonju Film Festival, Jeonju
San Francisco Film Festival, San Francisco
PDX FEST, Portland
Migrating Forms, New York
Munich International Film Festival, Munich
Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle
Chicago Filmmakers, Seattle
Ghent International Film Festival, Ghent
Jerusalem International Film Festival, Jerusalem
America’s Indie Finest at Unknown Pleasures, Berlin; Festival
Itinerrance, Paris

Awards;
Full Frame Film Festival: HBO Emerging Filmmaker Award; Honorable Mention
Cinema Du Reel: Special Mention Library Award
Winner Pierre and Yolande Perrault Grant