Suitcase of Love and Shame

NEW DOCS

This provocative and atmospheric film reminds us that the obsession with recording intimate moments (and the voyeuristic impulse to watch them) didn’t originate with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s 1995 sex tape. In the 1960s, Midwesterners Tom and Jeanie corresponded with each other and recorded their extramarital affair on reel-to-reel tapes, amassing sixty hours of sonic confessions and sexual encounters. These testaments to a desire assumed to be eternal were forgotten and decades later dispassionately auctioned off on eBay. From the tapes, filmmaker Jane Gillooly constructs a narrative arc of mediated romance, where eroticism and technological novelty have the same shelf life. Her film invites us to listen in on a relationship with the critical distance five decades can provide and to contemplate how our own confessions—so willingly offered up in emails and on social media—might read fifty years from now.  TW

Director

Jane Gillooly

Producer

Jane Gillooly

Editors

Jane Gillooly, Pam Larson

Cinematographer

Beth Cloutier

Release Year

2013

Festival Year

2013

Country

United States

Run Time

70 minutes

Premiere

North American Premiere