Fox Maxy

Thousandsuns
Cinema

Fox Maxy © Kava Gorna

Fox Maxy (Luiseño/Payómkawichum and Diegueño/Iipay Kumeyaay) is an artist and filmmaker who grew up in inland San Diego. Her avant-garde film practice consists of meticulously edited moving images gathered from the artist’s own personal archive, traversing fragmented landscapes and happenings in the present to pose questions about the fluidity of identity, land, nature, and time. These assemblages of unconventional visuals, off-kilter sound and thematics carry the viewer through dimensions that span from the personal to the universal. She received a BFA in Communications Design and Art History from Pratt Institute (2014), and studied political science & cultural studies at the University of San Diego (2010–12) and cinematic arts & technology at the Institute of American Indian Arts (2017–19). Her work has been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Black Star Film Festival, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Camden International Film Festival, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BAMcinemaFest. She is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants including an Ammodo Tiger Short Competition Award from International Film Festival Rotterdam (2021), a New Cinema Award from Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2021), a Merata Mita Fellowship from Sundance Institute (2022), and a Borderlands Fellowship from Vera List Center (2022–24). She lives and works in San Diego, California.

ONLINE SCREENING DATES: January 9 – January 30, 2023

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: Maat, 30 min, 2020; San Diego, 32 min, 2020; ✧Ⓑ☠☻Ⓛ♡Ⓞ✇☟Ⓞ☁☽Ⓓ✰ ⓜⓐⓣⓔⓡⓘⓐⓛⓢ✦, 11 min, 2021

This series is co-selected and presented with COUSIN collective and is generously funded by a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Maat, 30 min, 2020

In Maat, Fox Maxy has created an intoxicating and urgent film collage that gives invigorating expression to contemporary Indigenous identity, culture, and experience. Exploring the question, “what does it mean to come from somewhere?”, Maxy pays homage to the land and her surroundings, whilst challenging us to think about the painful and multi-layered histories that exist within territories scarred by settler colonialism. – Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

San Diego, 32 min, 2020

This film is a reaction to colonialism and quarantine. It’s made from multiple perspectives and experiences, pieced together. There are various qualities of footage: lo-fi camcorders, iPhone, archival images, and screen recordings. The content is based on a question of how to keep our communities safe. – BlackStar Film Festival

✧Ⓑ☠☻Ⓛ♡Ⓞ✇☟Ⓞ☁☽Ⓓ✰ ⓜⓐⓣⓔⓡⓘⓐⓛⓢ✦, 11 min, 2021

This film is about gifts from your blood.

I started filming things on my phone over a decade ago. I like to capture stuff; it’s really healing for me. For a long time, I was working in New York City in fashion, which involved a lot of preparation of presentations and mood boards, so creating visuals was already in my system, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. Filming became an everyday routine for me, something that I had to do even though it pissed off everyone around me. Nobody wants a camera in their face at all times.

I realized I was creating such a large archive of imagery but had nowhere to put it, no reason for doing it other than the love of filming on my phone. From there, I had to build up my confidence to make something out of it that wasn’t just for Instagram. I felt that I needed to make a movie, so over quarantine, I did just that. Watching back what I had made, I realized that I didn’t need to make anything that you might see in theaters or on streaming platforms. I had my own visual style and my own way of editing, so now I focus really heavily on making up my own rules. – Fox Maxy

Read the full interview with Fox Maxy at The Brooklyn Rail.

Listen to an interview between Fox Maxy and Alice Miller at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival.

Listen to the soundtrack of the film San Diego.