Sam: Is there a film or filmmaker that when you first started in school, impacted on you?

Gabby: So I think like most people, my experience with cinema was largely commercial with a little bit of documentary mixed-in until I got to college. The only film class I could get into my first semester at UNC Wilmington was Appreciation of Modern Cinema. The registrar was really clear, “You're not going to be watching James Bond. This is going to be international stuff.” And I thought, okay, that's cool. I want to see some other stuff. The professor who isn't there anymore is this guy who I think went to Wisconsin, Madison, where they have a ton of experimental research there. He knew some cool stuff, and I wasn't ready [for it]. For the most part, the stuff that he showed, I was like, “I really am not enjoying this. This is difficult in a way that I'm not appreciating. It's 9 o’clock. The theater is dark. I'm very tired. I'm not vibing with this.”

Then on the last day of class, he showed William Greaves’, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, and it blew my mind apart. The entire theater- there's 219 of us- was giving a standing ovation. Which is funny, cause I don't make narrative experimental work and that's what that is. It's definitely a hybrid narrative experimental work. I make experimental non-fiction, but it still was the first time that my brain kind of went, “Hey, are you paying attention? This could be cool.”

Sam: What excites you about being involved with Visions 10 Film Festival & Conference?

Gabby: I'm an immunocompromised filmmaker. It's a pandemic. I don't get to go places. So being asked to be part of this event that is already totally virtual, it's super accessible. And it's exciting to me in that way because it means that I get to be in a community with filmmakers and with scholars at a time when we are all little boxes on screen and increasingly isolated.

Sam: What challenges have you faced in your educational career or career in general?

Gabby: We have to talk about how underfunded the arts are in this country. I remember being in graduate school and listening to other filmmakers say, “it's a tremendous privilege to be an artist.” And what they mean is, it is not a thing that one can undertake with any idea that there will be financial security. I think the assumption was that people have a social safety net to make work and do things. This is a thing that I've encountered over and over and over again. There's this assumption that I must be comfortable or I must be middle-class because I've decided to not only undertake a career as an art maker and educator but one with an art form that is directly oppositional to the profit motive, right?

Experimental film by definition is not interested in revenue generation. In fact, in many ways, it seeks to oppose the idea that art exists to feed the profit motive. That assumption is, number one, baseless and it's wrong. And number two, it's frustrating because it assumes that, “Oh, they'll be all right there. They obviously have some level of comfort because they're making this work.”

But, it's not true, right? I would argue that my life is an endorsement for having a strong public safety net. I grew up super poor and working class. If not for the North Carolina Medicaid system, I probably wouldn't have seen a doctor regularly. I definitely would have never seen a dentist. I was on food stamps for a large portion of my childhood. My family faced eviction twice before I was 10 years old. I had a pretty unstable and financially insecure upbringing. I'm not saying that my parents didn't do their best. They absolutely did. They valued education. And I think that's a big reason why I've had the success I've had. I have a brother, who's an attorney, and another one who is in business. Four of their five kids have graduated college. Their fifth is in college. Education was a core value. It was practiced. It was enforced with regularity and strictness, but it was not altogether a stable, privileged environment.

Combating that assumption is really critical, and it makes it difficult to do things to advocate for support or to get the backing that I need to make work and submit it places and make appearances places for little to no money. This has meant quite a bit of working of two or three jobs. I worked three jobs all the way through undergrad. I still had a tremendous amount of debt. Then I went to graduate school where I continued to work a lot and accumulated even more debt at a private institution for three years. In my adult working life- since I turned 18- I've only had one academic year where I only had one full-time job.

The class barrier, the workload, the stagnation issue, these are all huge barriers. And, I know that it makes a difference because that one academic year where I did have that one job steady employment, it was my best exhibition year on record. I showed in Europe. I got to make more work. I get to finish more work. I took my time. I got to really see the rewards of focusing on my craft in a way that I was not able to when I was hustling between two, three, and four things to make ends meet. So I think that my biggest challenge is this class divide which is, of course, enhanced by race in this country. Because you can't separate endemic poverty from endemic racism.

Sam: What do you want viewers to take away from your experimental work?

Gabby: I would say from my perspective as a maker, I am really process-oriented. The making of the film is what I'm interested in. Tiffany Albright, we made our FST 495 films together. She's the producer. I'm the director. It was totally a partnership, and I remember her saying to me really early on- we'd only known each other for six months- she said, “you just need to be left alone in a dark room to make your films and then put it out on a lunch tray and push it out the slot for someone else to go make sure it gets shown.”

I have this problem where I don't really care [what happens to the film after it’s made]. I would say that was more true when I was younger. Now, there are reasons [for my work] to be shown that I can mentally get my head around, like jobs and stuff. I'm like, “yeah, it should show.”

It would be good if it made an impact on people. If they're going to have to see it anyway, it'd be great if they felt something. That feeling something is what's really important to me. Because my word is a kind of catharsis for me making it, I'm going for emotional impact while people are watching it. It is my hope that it's a gut punch that leads to inquiry. I want enough of an emotional impact that a curious mind will begin to look into things, right?

The project I'm working on right now- I'm working on a feature experimental doc about race and migration- but the emotion of it is it's about my family. It's about me. It's about really complicated emotional understandings of race and ethnicity and nationalism. But through this lens of: “Hey, here's the historical and social things that occurred that led to my family being in this country.” And so adding the space of deep intimacy, right? A lot of times, it's like my voice or my images on screen or me talking to someone that I love really deeply and personally combined with the historical reality of what's being discussed. So, if I can have that moment of emotional connection with people- understanding that vulnerability I'm putting into this- and it leads them to a place of greater intellectual inquiry, that feels like a win to me.