Lise Swenson

Under the thick gray fog and rain clouds of a San Francisco winter, Jenny's wedding approaches. She adores her fiancé, but is on edge about something she can't quite put her finger on. Then she finds an old photograph of her grandmother in her wedding dress, and everything seems to fall into place. She knows she must get married in that dress. Jenny's fears and doubt ignite into an obsessive journey to her estranged aunt's home at the Salton Sea, an environmentally devastated and long forgotten vacation spot, in search of the dress. In the blazing arid heat of this decimated landscape, and amid piles and piles of three generations of her family's hoarding, Jenny searches; looking for the dress, looking for her family's past, and looking for herself. In the brightness of the desert there is nowhere to hide and Jenny is forced to make some of the hardest decisions of her life so that she can realize her future.

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A bilingual film, "Mission Movie/Una Pelicula de la Mision" inspects the themes of territory, diversity, and belonging through the intertwined lives of neighbors in San Francisco's Mission District. Mark, a white, traditionally trained artist, is forced to seek the help of Roger, a Latino artist born and raised in the Mission, to confront a group of kids who have been tagging his mural. Meanwhile, Mark and his troubled hipster roommates amble into activism as they face eviction from their apartment. Also being evicted from the building are Rosario and Rene, recent immigrants whose marriage is tested by their new environment. Antonia, a third-generation resident, finds the fruits of her success making her an "accidental" target. And George, a Palestinian shop-owner struggles as his love for his decidedly American children is challenged by conflicting values. "Mission Movie" depicts the cutting edge of a socio-political change, foreshadowing what will happen in the rest of America.

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A record of the series of creative actions and public interventions staged by San Francisco artists in the early 2000’s in response to the escalating rents and evictions brought on by the first wave of tech, the so-called “dot com boom.”

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