“The search for a history represents a search for stability, community, a home. In [Nomads…] we see Finley write on someone’s hands, “If only I could find history simply by pressing the palms of your hands against my chest.” Yet history is elusive, intangible, ever changing : it stands outside these bodies.” —Marita Sturken, “The Politics of Video Memory”
Nomads at the 25 Door explores memory’s construction of an ephemeral homeland when a concrete one is lost, stolen, or left behind. The film is constructed in three chapters structured around a series of interviews between the video maker and Mickey Yates, a 22 year old woman serving a double life sentence in the Nevada Woman’s Correctional Institution for the murder of her mother.
Evocative visual imagery and sound, interwoven throughout these three chapters, establishes relationships between the unique narratives. The resonance created between the narratives documents the shifts in power between the individual and their family, between the government and its people, between the documented and the betrayed, between our hopes for stability of home and the fragility of our memory.