Our City Dreams

Ghada Amer in “Our City Dreams. Photo: First Run Features.

Work by Ghader Amer as seen in “Our City Dreams.” Image Courtesy of First Run Films.

Our City Dreams, a new documentary by Chiara Clemente (daughter of artist Francesco Clemente), will debut at Film Forum, Feb. 4-17, 2009. Filmed over the course of two years, this “love letter” to New York City strings together self-told narratives by five women artists, ages 30 – 80: Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith (Season 2), Marina Abramovic and Nancy Spero (Season 4). Each artist has a passion for making art that is inseparable from her devotion to New York.

Clemente captures significant moments in these artists’s lives, including Swoon’s first solo exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York, Ghada Amer’s return to her Egyptian homeland, Kiki Smith’s traveling retrospective, Marina Abramovic’s week-long series of performances at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Nancy Spero’s preparation of a new piece for the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Ronnie Scheib in Variety writes that the film is “exquisitely crafted” and “ranks as a work of art itself.”