"Two or three things I know for sure and, one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open."

Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, pg 48

North by Current weaves documentary storytelling, poetry, family mythology, and the liminality of memory to explore four years in the filmmakers’ family of origin, after the tragic death of his sister’s first child. The discussion guide will similarly weave poetry as a tool to reflect on the topics presented in the film. North by Current examines the universality of both spoken and unspoken themes.

“Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don’t do that. I never do.

Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.

Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.”

--Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, p. 39

The spoken themes of grief, loss and coping, addiction, mental health, intimate partner violence, the criminal legal system, transgender identity, the influence of religion, patriarchy and gender roles, family dynamics and history, and the perspective of children in North By Current give insight into one familys’ experience. The backdrop of rural, poor, white America, provides a backdrop for unspoken themes, and provides the context in which this experience exists. According to the Institute for Research on Poverty, “[N]ationally, about one in five children live in a family with an income below the poverty threshold; more than one in four rural children lives in poverty, with even higher rates for rural children of color.” Grayling, Michigan, the filmmaker’s hometown, has a population of roughly 5,600, 98.2% of whom are white, and 13.3% of the town’s population living in poverty.

Initially, filmmaker, Angelo Madsen Minax, disclosed that he intended to examine injustices within the criminal legal and carceral systems through the lens of class, location, race, and gender. While these themes are present throughout the film, they surface in snippets of his family members' memories and recollections of their lived experiences.

“Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it.”

-Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, p. 75

North by Current invites the viewer to piece together their understanding of the non-linear, and as Minax’s mother states, “circular grieving process” of coping with the loss of his 19 month old neice, Kalla. The film does so without taking on a singular perspective. Instead, each family member: grandparents, siblings, spouses, and children offer elements of their experience from their particular point of view.

“Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”

-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, p. 90

The film gently illuminates the tension many transgender and queer people who opt to migrate to urban places, experience when faced with returning home to rural places. Viewers bear witness to this negotiation as we watch Minax coming and going between his historic hometown and his current city life.

“This particular relation between the queer/trans body and the city is strangely resonant...We the emotionally starved; we, who have been thrown from the void, who have turned to the city when there was nowhere else. Well, maybe not all of us, but I know I have so many times felt the city itself was my mother, and I her asphalt nursling.”

-Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox, p.. 69

Minax’s transgender identity, while not the focus in an educative sense, provides the undercurrent to story. He learns that his parents equated their grieving process related to his transition to their grieving process of their granddaughter’s actual death. Over the course of the four years of filming, the audience gets to witness transformation, shift in perspective, and ultimately growth and repair between Minax and his parents.

“You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I--which is why I can’t turn away from you.”

-Ocean Vuong,On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, p. 14

Themes of motherhood, the Mormon belief in the supreme responsibility of reproduction to create earthly homes for spirits awaiting bodies, and the role patriarchy and masculinity play in these belief systems, also highlight the important ways that queerness fundamentally challenges these rigidly structured sets of ideas.

“I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong.

The rules, they were already inside us.”

-Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, p. 120

The use of narration and poetic reflection by Minax, as well as an omniscient child voice - and eventually dialogue between the two - provide insight into Minax’s subjective experience. This artfully allows the viewer to delve into themes present in his mind as he cycles through his own grief around the loss of his niece and his family’s response to his gender identity. This is in contrast to the silence from his sister about the experience of losing a child. Alongside one another, these personal responses provide another window into the complexity of grief and the ways people within a family system cope with loss. Instead of hearing her express her reflections, we see bits and pieces of Jesse’s subsequent three pregnancies and the reality of raising children within the context of an abusive relationship, rippled with substance use, and the unspoken presence of her lost child.

“3.

The technology of silence

The ritual, etiquette

the blurring of terms

silence not absence

of words or music or even

raw sounds

Silence can be a plan

rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence

it has a history a form

Do not confuse it

with any kind of absence”

-Adrienne Rich, excerpt from “Cartographies of Silence”
The Dream of a Common Language,pg. 17

As time unfolds, we see three children grow from infants to toddlers to young children. Through their eyes and words, the audience has a window into their understanding of their father’s incarceration and eventual release; their mother’s struggles with grief, addiction, and mental health; and their parent’s relationship, which includes physical abuse.

“Be a child again. Teach me poetry. Teach me the rhythm of the sea. Return to words their original innocence. Give birth to me from a grain of wheat, not from a wound. Give birth to me and take me back to a world before meaning, so I can embrace you on the grass. Do you hear me? A world before meaning. The tall trees walked with us as trees, not as meaning. The naked moon crawled with us. A moon, not a silver platter, for meaning. Be a child again. Teach me poetry. Teach me the rhythm of the sea. Take my hand, so we can cross this threshold between night and day together. Together we will learn the first words, and will build a secret nest of the sparrow, our third sibling. Be a child again, so I can see my face in your mirror. Are you I? Am I you? Teach me poetry, so I can elegize you now, now, now. Just as you elegize me!”

-Mahmoud Darwish, excerpt of “III”
In the Presence of Absence, p. 32

Throughout the film, the audience is able to see the family over time. There are opportunities to circle back to bits of the story left out in previous tellings. There are chances to understand that the telling doesn’t all happen at once. We learn that questions can provoke new information, that silence can tell it’s own story, that different perspectives and recollections don’t have to be in competition with one another, and that the story won’t end when the camera stops rolling.

i am not done yet

“as possible as yeast

as imminent as bread

a collection of safe habits

a collection of cares

less certain that i seem

more certain than i was

a changed changer

i continue to continue

where i have been

most of my lives is

where i’m going”

-Lucille Clifton, “i am not done yet”
good woman: poems and a memoir1969-1980, pg. 141

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