Cara Perlman Bio | Part 4 - 2000s
2000s
(Jane Smith and Steve Buscemi)
I decided to make a film about Jane Smith, the mother of Kiki Smith. She was almost 90 when I started. Her daughter, Kiki was famous now and her husband and Kiki’s father Tony Smith was even a more famous sculptor. Jane, a good friend of Tennessee Williams was an actress in Hollywood in the 40’s and she also sang a lot of opera. She had good stories. I produced a half hour piece about her called JANE SMITH 2000. It was my first commitment to film in a while as a serious effort. Jane loved it. She died maybe two-years later.
(Jane Smith)
9/11 happened. I watched it with a small hoard of people at my street corner, at Lispenard and Church. After both buildings fell down I met up with Laura Flanders who had been an experienced reporter in Beirut and the two of us took off toward the site and tried to get as close as we could. Debris was flying and floating everywhere. The cops wouldn’t let us south beyond Chambers Street. We were supposed to evacuate the neighborhood that night but I stayed. The next morning I went out and everything was completely covered with soot: streets, buildings, trees. Someone put bouquets of flowers on the tops of trashed cars. I walked around TriBeCa with sunglasses and a gas mask on and cried inside them. ID was required for a month afterward anytime anyone wanted to go below Canal Street. So I had to show ID in order to go home. There was hardly anyone around. It smelled bad. It felt bad. I started running along the pier where the air was better. I saw the Trade Center site being gutted and cleaned day and night. The massive hoses never stopped pumping water. The Westside Highway was a huge parade of strange trucks and people in all kinds of uniforms working feverishly.
I decided I needed a separate workspace. I continued to live at Lispenard Street and rented a studio in Long Island City. It was quiet and soft and the rents were pretty reasonable. There was a rundown but chic tennis club at the end of the block. I joined and learned how to play tennis while I was working, out there. It was very fun to play outside and see Manhattan across the East River. I stayed for two-years and then came back.
(Walker Art Center)
In 2002 I made a set for Amanda Miller at the Zurich Ballet. Amanda was a talented former student of Bill Forsythe. The set was a film about animals in the Bronx Zoo. I also made another set for Amanda this time in the States making inflatables for the stage, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. John Zorn did the music.
I was getting less excited about working with materials, materials that were possibly toxic. I was feeling the pull of the screen. In 2003 I decided to film the ski jumpers at Lake Placid because I thought it was a beautiful sport to watch, that I could do something with it and also and I could get there by car. I identified a few kids and followed them. It was a short film called SKI JUMPING IN THE US and ESPN picked it up and put it on their website as the Extreme Sport of the Month. They also hired me to write about it.
I was moving away from the art world. I wanted freedom from the studio life. I wanted to be around people. I wasn’t able to continue to pull off a lucrative career and I wasn’t invested in staying in the art world no matter what. Film was grabbing me. In 2005 I made a short movie about immigration. I got a grant from the Puffin Foundation to finish it.
(Scene from 110%)
Then I saw on TV that the women ski jumpers were trying to get into the Olympics. They were being interviewed during the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy and they talked about ski jumping being the only sport in the winter Olympics that didn’t have women. I called their PR person. The next day I got a huge package and a request to take on their story. I followed them for the next almost four-years and made a feature documentary about the US women’s team. 110% premiered on WNRK TV in Norway in 2011 and went to the Lake Placid Film Festival. It got distribution and it can be watched on iTunes. I met a guy who said he saw it recently on an airplane coming from Abu Dhabi to New York.
(Scene from 110%)
It was exhausting and expensive to make this film and I wanted to make another one. I loved meeting people, traveling, editing. Okay, what’s next? I spent the next two-years trying to figure out what I wanted as my next subject in film. I had firmly left the art world behind.
I decided to mine yoga and other spiritual territory. I came across a lot of press about John Friend, the former genius CEO of Anusara Yoga who got caught in a series of scandals. I interviewed some of the folks involved with him. But it still was not right. Then I came across Christie McNally’s Facebook page and the rest is…the present.











