ALEX STRADA


In 1935, in exile after fleeing Germany, poet and political philosopher Bertolt Brecht wrote “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties.” The essay unpacks the difficult imperative of understanding the nature of “truth” amidst the rise of fascism, capitalist exploitation, and land privatization across Europe. truths is an experimental documentary that uses Brecht’s essay against itself to explore embodied and epistemological questions of “truth” in relation to labor.

Many historians argue that multiple women helped to write Brecht’s work but received no credit. The soundtrack consists of excerpts from interviews with female-identifying and non-binary poets and philosophers, including Claudia Rankine, Natalie Diaz, Gayatri Spivak, Eileen Myles, Vanessa Wills, and Silvia Federici, that have been pulled apart and woven together. The visuals consist of long shots of interconnected hidden labor occurring throughout a quickly gentrifying block in Manhattan and span art conservation, meatpacking, and the maintenance of shoreline erosion. Organized like a wandering mind, viewers are asked to think dialectically as what they see and hear converges and contrasts. Through juxtapositions, insights, schisms, continuities, and cracks, the film frames “truth” as simultaneously physical and abstract, contradictory, porous, felt, unknowable, and perpetually in motion.

This film is supported by the NYFA Women’s Fund for Media Artists and the New York State Council for the Arts.

truths, 2021, still from 4K video, 21 minutes












Research image with stills from 4K video interviews with Silvia Federici, Claudia Rankine, Erin Cloud, Vanessa Wills, Natalie Diaz, Monica Youn, Sarah Schulman, Clarasita Zambrana, and Eileen Myles