Video Visit by Malika Zouhali-Worrall

A Piano Played By Ear

Curated by Paola Paleari

October 4 – 25

Malika Zouhali-Worrall

Video Visit, 2021

HD video and sound, single screen, partly subtitled, 22’44 min

Each week, scores of people visit the Brooklyn Public Library to see their incarcerated loved ones via a free video call. For many, the imperfect, virtual interactions of the so-called video visits are preferable to the traumatizing and humiliating process of traveling to New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail. Video Visit tells the story of two mothers and their sons, and the librarians who negotiate daily with the Department of Corrections (and a growing for-profit prison telecoms industry) in an effort to keep the families connected.

Through the film, Malika Zouhali-Worrall captured the structural tensions inherent in the U.S. prison system and highlighted the continued efforts by U.S. public libraries to establish networks of care that could fill the social services void left by federal and local governments. While the library workers and patrons are trying to solve the devastating problem of traumatic prison visits, the remote communication program itself can never be a solution to the inhumane conditions created by mass incarceration.

By calling attention to themes of creeping surveillance, family separation through detention, as well as the mundane brutality of both bureaucratic power and the supposedly “neutral” technology companies that are profiting from incarceration, Video Visit provokes a conversation about institutional care versus institutional violence, to ask: who are these institutions serving?

CREDITS
Director: Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Producer: Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Executive Producers: (for Firelight Media) Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, Loira Limbal, (for Field of Vision) Charlotte Cook
Director of Photography: Naiti Gámez
Editor: Rabab Haj Yahya
Sound Recordists: Aisha Hallgren, Vera Quispe
Composer: Roger Suen

For Field of Vision:
Co-Founder & Executive Producer: Charlotte Cook
Managing Director: Kristen Fitzpatrick
Post Production Manager: Shakira Evans
Development & Artist Support Associate: Sarah Choi
Technical Director: Josh Begley
Executive Assistant: Kristin Dulog

Malika Zouhali-Worrall is a British/Moroccan filmmaker based in New York. An Emmy Award-winning director, her directing credits include Call Me Kuchu (Berlinale, Netflix, BBC World, 2012), Thank You For Playing (Tribeca, POV/ITVS, News & Television Emmy Award, 2015), Earn A Living (ARTE, IDFA, 2018), and her recent short for PBS American Masters, Strange Grace: The Art of Amyra León (2020). As an editor, she most recently edited Through The Night (Tribeca, POV, 2020), a film by Loira Limbal that was a New York Times and Hollywood Reporter critic’s pick, and recently named on The Guardian’s Ten Best Documentaries of 2020 List. Malika is a 2019 Chicken & Egg Awardee, a 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow, and a 2020 William Greaves Award recipient.

Paola Paleari (b. 1984) is an Italian independent writer, editor and curator based in Copenhagen. She co-curated the Contemporary Art Program 2021-2022 at Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon and has directed the exhibition platform JIR SANDEL since 2018. She writes extensively about contemporary art and between 2013 and 2018 she covered the position of Deputy Editor at YET magazine. Her main area of interest is the photographic language and its relations with contemporary visual culture and art practices. She is also interested in the intersection between critical and creative writing and often intertwines art criticism with other forms of storytelling.

Malika Zouhali-Worrall, Video Visit, 2021, HD video and sound, single screen, partly subtitled, 22 min