Filmmakers and Producers

Jesse Lerner

Jesse Lerner is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His short films Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), Magnavoz (2006), and T.S.H. (2004), and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland(1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), and The Absent Stone (2013, with Sandra Rozental) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan, and have has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles Film Festivals. His books include The Maya of Modernism, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (with Alex Juhasz), , Ism Ism Ism (with Luciano Piazza), The Catherwood Project (with Leandro Katz), and The Shock of Modernity.

AVAILABLE FROM TWN

The Absent Stone
Sandra Rozental & Jesse Lerner
2013, 82 min., Color, Mexico
In 1964, a colossal pre-Hispanic monolith was taken from the town of San Miguel Coatlinchan in the state of Mexico and brought to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Since then, the absent monolith has been present in the memories of the town’s inhabitants, as well as in endless repr...

Natives
Jesse Lerner
1999, 24 min., BW, US
At once ironic and disturbing, NATIVES documents the fears and jingoism of residents of San Diego county in their 'patriotic' attempts to exclude illegal Mexican immigrants....

Ruins
Jesse Lerner
1999, 78 min., BW, US
Ancient Maya and Aztec objects have been shown in circuses, art galleries, World's Fairs and natural history museums. This experimental documentary suggests how diplomacy and Pan-Americanism recast archaeological objects as art. Part faked newsreel, part travelogue, part drug-induced hippie rant an...

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