Film Projects

Red Thread: the prisoner and the painter

An 18 minute Operatic short film, based on the poetry of Judith Clark

A sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts :: New York State Council of the Arts Grant Recipient, Film & Media, 2013

Two women of the sixties in their sixties write an operatic film inside a maximum security prison where one of them is serving a 75 year sentence .

Distributed by Indiepix Films (trailer)

“Spear has created a resonant dialogue between her own art and Clark’s poetry, a story of misplaced revolutionary desire for justice, defiance of the establishment, and thirty-plus years behind bars, where Clark has transformed herself and her mission. This is a tale of tremendous longing and accomplishment, lost and regained motherhood, twentieth-century history, and the courage of both prisoner and painter, resulting in a work that fuses transcendent beauty and jolting social truths." — Lucy R. Lippard, 2013

Past: A retelling of Uncle Tom's Cabin (part 1)

The first of an intended 4-part work on Harriet Beecher Stowe's seminal novel

A sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts