In Shared Resources, artist Jordan Lord offers a radical rethinking of documentary, debt, and the ties that bind. Shot over five years, the film follows Lord’s family through bankruptcy after their father Albert loses his job as a debt collector, the accumulation of loans to fund Jordan’s education, and Albert’s increasing disability from chemical exposure during his military service. But the film is not simply a record of hardship. Lord frames these experiences within a broader meditation on indebtedness and interdependence—social, familial, and artistic. Throughout, Lord and their parents negotiate how the family is represented, underscoring the film’s creation as a web of debts made to and with one another. Open captions and audio description—created and voiced by the family—extend this ethic of mutual support, offering access not just as accommodation, but as a way of sharing experience. Candid, complex, and formally inventive, Shared Resources asks what it means to owe each other everything.
Followed by a conversation with Jordan Lord and the scholar and curator Risa Puleo. Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.
2021, USA
Format: Digital
In English with open captions and audio description
98 minutes followed by discussion
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist working across video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, support, access, disability, and documentary. Solo exhibitions include Prophetic Memory at Artists Space (New York), The Voice of Democracy at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Buffalo), and exhibitions at Piper Keys (London). Lord’s films have screened internationally at major festivals and arts venues, including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art (Brooklyn), Camden Art Centre (London), ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), DOC NYC (New York), DokuFest International Documentary and Short Film Festival (Prizren, Kosovo), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (UK), Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (Arkansas), New Orleans Film Festival, and San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, among others. Their debut feature, Shared Resources (2021), won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival, the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and a Special Jury Mention at the New Orleans Film Festival. Lord was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2021, and their work has been featured in publications including Screen Slate, Filmmaker Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, and Hyperallergic.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). This film has open captions and audio description. The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops.