The Pain Of Others/Normal Appearances

THE PAIN OF OTHERS is a YouTube compilation film about Morgellons, a mysterious illness whose sufferers say they have parasites under the skin, long colored fibers emerging from lesions, and a host of other bizarre symptoms which sound borrowed from a horror film. The film carefully sets up a space of unsettling encounter with a group of “Morgies” who have turned to YouTube to find help and to prove they’re not crazy.  Intimate and unflinching, disturbing and at times funny – The Pain of Others attempts an act of radical empathy.

NORMAL APPEARANCES: An unsettling supercut of the women of #BachelorNation watching themselves being watched. A sort of ambivalent fan vid?

Followed by a live video chat with filmmaker Penny Lane. 

Penny Lane is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker who was named one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and a Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Award winner.  THE PAIN OF OTHERS premiered at Rotterdam 2018, and went on to BAMcinemaFest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, SF DocFest, BAFICI, Sarasota and Maryland Film Festivals.

Her second feature-length documentary NUTS! premiered at Sundance 2016, where it won a Special Jury Award for Editing. It has since screened at many other film festivals such as Hot Docs, Full Frame, Ashland, Maryland, Cleveland, Sarasota and BAFICI. 

Her debut feature-length documentary OUR NIXON premiered at Rotterdam 2013, had its North American premiere at SXSW, won the Ken Burns Award for “Best of the Festival” at Ann Arbor, and was selected as the Closing Night Film at New Directors/New Films. 

She received her MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA in American Culture and Media Studies at Vassar College. She has taught film, video and new media art at Bard College, Hampshire College and Williams College. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University, where she lives in a very old house and shows movies in her barn. And yes, Penny Lane is her real name.