Dinca

The internet: it connects us, it disconnects us. This apparent dichotomy runs through our daily lives and its prevalence is pervasive enough that it spurs us to live adaptably as technology expands the mass proliferation of information throughout our world.

Dirt Daughter (2019), a short-film by Baltimore-based Marnie Ellen Hertzler, centers around protagonist Lily (remarkably played by Isobel Arnberg), a security guard working for AINet, a company whose slogan reads “Our Infrastructure. Your Data.”

With deft whimsy, Hertzler consolidates many acute observations into a short duration: Lily’s free verse musings carry us through her atypical surroundings, where setting provides opportunity to reflect on the strangeness of living in the here-and-now as viewed through the lens of technology, and raising questions: how do we view life, and how do we choose to live life, as we exist and live with technology and the internet, and within digital and physical spaces? Surely levity is required.

Dirt Daughter is streaming on The Criterion Channel and on Vimeo. Original score by Dan Deacon. Read an interview with Marnie Ellen Hertzler by Penelope Bartlett, “Alone in There: Marnie Ellen Hertzler on Dirt Daughter” over at The Current.

Marnie Ellen HERTZLER (1988, USA) is a video artist, animator and filmmaker living and working in Baltimore. Her multi-media films and animations are often accompanied by live performance, installation and web design. Her short film Hi I Need to be Loved had its world premiere at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival. In 2018, Hertzler was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She is currently in post-production on her first feature film Crestone.