Songbook
Mariah Garnett / United States / 2025 / World Premiere / 55 min
Two parallel paths are intertwined in a film in which artist Mariah Garnett stages an opera written by her great-great grandmother in Cairo.
Mariah Garnett’s ‘Songbook’ intertwines two parallel processes: A process of staging an opera composed by Garnett’s great-great-grandmother with contributions from an international cast of musicians and performers, and a journey to Cairo, where her great-great-grandmother, Ruth Lynda Deyo, once lived and worked. Her diaries contain passages transcribed from her conversations with spirits who reassured her not to worry about money or the broken state of the world.