Crossing Columbus (2020) by Cathy Lee Crane
Friday, June 13, 2025, 8:00 pm
Cathy Lee Crane: Drawing the Line
+ Crossing Columbus
Presented in Association with The New Farm
Doors open 4pm for installation viewing. Film screening 8pm.
Suggested Admission/Donation: $20. No one turned away for lack of funds.
The New Farm and San Francisco Cinematheque present the world premiere of Cathy Lee Crane’s Drawing the Line, a multi-platform installation project exploring the US/Mexico Western boundary. A lyrical re-combination of staged and archival material, this hybrid historical work has been developed in collaboration with fellow artists in the borderlands. On view beginning at 4pm, the elements comprising Drawing the Line—On the Line (2010), terrestrial sea (2021), Border Dwellers (2025) and the gallery diptych Counter Storytelling—will be on view, followed by the San Francisco premiere of Crane’s Crossing Columbus (2020).
Crossing Columbus: History haunts the border town of Columbus, New Mexico when Mexican riders on horseback cross the line to commemorate Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid. As border dwellers and their divergent accounts of the Villa raid are introduced, the existential borderline that shapes their lives comes into focus.
A conversation director Cathy Lee Crane, sound designer Jeremiah Moore, soundtrack composer Beth Custer and Cinematographer Tijana Petrovic will precede the 8pm screening.
Cathy Lee Crane has been making films since 1994 when she was a graduate student at San Francisco State University. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Her body of work enjoyed its first survey in 2015 as part of the American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. Crane’s award-winning films include the experimental biographies Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil (2006). Her work is distributed by Video Data Bank, Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. In 2020 she released Crossing Columbus, a feature-length documentary about the border town of Columbus, New Mexico which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency and the El Paso Community Foundation’s Border Arts Residency. Her engagement with the history of the US/Mexico border continues. As the 2022 Artist in Residence at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, she presented the work-in-progress installation for Drawing the Line which was reviewed in Filmmaker Magazine. She is currently researching a new film on the US/Mexico transboundary aquifers. Crane is a Professor of Film at Ithaca College. www.cathyleecrane.com