Kathryn Ramey

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

EL SIGNO VACÍO (the empty sign) is a feature length cinematic essay interrogating the 120-year US occupation of Puerto Rico and the filmmaker’s bizarre connection to it via her surname, RAMEY, to reveal how US democratic narratives effectively obscure her capitalist/military domination of the islands.

This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker was one of many expansionists who believed it was America's Manifest Destiny to conquer all of the Americas and who engaged in border raids in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Filmmaker Kathryn Ramey blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing, and time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to historymaking that have been applied to this story.

An unfaithful remake of Man Ray’s 1926 “Emak Bakia” made without the use of a motion picture camera, ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE is a nonsensical response to brutality alongside a celebration of silver process. The film uses a variety unconventional image making and hand-printing strategies to achieve its hi-contrast jittery style including contact printing with a mag-light taped to a sync block and hand-processing in a bucket. No conventional motion picture processes/tools/labs were used. The film is meant to be played/looped at 24fps with the soundtrack provided by the image.

“When a heterosexual dude makes a film about his kids, that is very political. When a woman makes a film that engages with the act of being a parent, it’s often seen as less significant. That shows how political it is because even now, motherhood is a terrible double bind. When I was expecting my first child, I was told by more than one female filmmaker, ‘Forget it, you’re done, you’ll never make a film again.’” –Kathryn Ramey, in dialogue with Sarah Keller & Yangqiao Lu

A 15-minute experimental documentary juxtaposing two 'hers': the American WEST via the Oregon Trail and Elizabeth Crandall Perry, adventurer, midwife, mother of fourteen and the filmmaker's great great grandmother.

LIMEN - threshold. between two states of being. the boundary of perception.