https://cuylerballenger.com Cuyler Ballenger Tue, 17 Jun 2025 18:32:19 +0000 https://cuylerballenger.com en https://cuylerballenger.com/SHADE-1 Sun, 29 Aug 2021 06:52:48 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/SHADE-1 Shade (Mini Dv, 20:14, Color, 2013 / 2016) Narrative fiction, non-professional actors. Budget &lt;$500 Screenings Public Cinema link https://cuylerballenger.com/BOLLER-STREET Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:55:04 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/BOLLER-STREET Boller Street SD Video. Sony DCR-PC100. Color. 14 min 05 sec. 2024. Boller Street is a short film tracing the story of my fifth great-grandmother, Yetta Ballenberg (née Rosenheim), the only member of her family to leave the small German village of Jebenhausen for the United States in the early 19th century. Shot on a return trip to the village in 2024, the film blends camcorder footage with speculative narration to explore the absence and fragmentation that often define Ashkenazi Jewish memory. Inspired by works like Shoah, Occupied City, and Summer in Baden-Baden, the film uses contemporary images to draw out buried histories. It shifts from an archival tone to a personal voice, merging observation, research, and familial inheritance. The two-lane road that gives the film its name runs through a place that has forgotten much of its Jewish past. Boller Street is a meditation on time, diaspora, and the imaginative labor required to reconstruct a history scattered by distance and erasure. Screenings Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. Museum of the History of Polish Jews. November 8, 2025. Ethnografilm Paris. Club De L’Etoile. April 5, 2026. I am sending you love from the future. Mandeville Art Gallery. La Jolla, CA. Jan 10 - Feb 9, 2025 https://cuylerballenger.com/MISSED-CALLS-AND-VOICEMAILS Tue, 27 Sep 2022 23:36:59 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/MISSED-CALLS-AND-VOICEMAILS Missed Calls and VoicemailsSD Video, MiniDV, 9:24. 2018 Fictionalized reality, non-professional actors. Budget &lt;$100&nbsp; JEFF BALLENGER... voicemails CUYLER BALLENGER ... selfALEXANDRA GARBER ... self Screenings 2020. Solo Exhibition. Lawndale Art Center, Houston.EXHIBITION VIDEO(made by Ryan Hawk) https://cuylerballenger.com/MALAISE Sun, 29 Aug 2021 06:33:29 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/MALAISE Malaise (Mini Dv Tapes, 11:18, BW, 2017) Fictionalized reality, non-professional actors. Budget &lt;$50 ANITA NEARY Alex Garber MOM Rachel Ballenger POOL GUY Gabe Vansant https://cuylerballenger.com/JEFF-READS-JOKES Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:25:39 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/JEFF-READS-JOKES Jeff Reads Jokes 4k RED. Color. 4:11. 2025 Fictionalized reality, non-professional actor. Budget &lt;$1000 (travel inlcuded) Jeff Reads Jokes is an ironic portrayal of an inside joke. Jeff is a great joke teller, specifically Jewish jokes. But put the camera on him, and he can’t do it. We both acknowledge this joke within a joke, and that’s why we needed to record it. The film is in part an homage to the 1996 photography book, Ray’s a Laugh by Richard Billingham, who famously photographed his impoverished, drunken family and exposed them to the art world. In a 2016 interview for the Guardian, Billingham was asked if Ray minded the photos (many of which portray Ray as a debauched lunatic) to which Billingham answered: “I don’t think he took any notice, or if he did it was probably that he was pleased I was in the room with him. The camera acted as a mediator.” Screenings: 2024. Long Drawings, Performance Space Gallery, UC San Diego https://cuylerballenger.com/SO-GOOD Fri, 15 Jan 2021 20:04:58 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/SO-GOOD So Good (Mini Dv, 6:23, Color, 2016) Fictionalized reality, non-professional actor. Budget $0 https://cuylerballenger.com/about Tue, 17 Jun 2025 18:32:19 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/about <img width="1280" height="1519" width_o="1280" height_o="1519" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a428d830483eed89dbef71fe1b5296b9542c7a1032f2ed20dbcdb8ff20942280/image-w856.png" data-mid="234705832" border="0" data-scale="27" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a428d830483eed89dbef71fe1b5296b9542c7a1032f2ed20dbcdb8ff20942280/image-w856.png" />Cuyler Ballenger (b. 1985 Novato, California) is a narrative and documentary filmmaker. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Books of Jacob, I am sending you love from the future, and Resonant Images (2024, 2025) in La Jolla, CA; Regulated Garbage (2022) in Los Angeles, CA; Trash Mountain, Inheritance, and Heavy Metal (2021, 2022) in Houston, TX. He has won some fellowships and a few prizes. He has a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Art from UC San Diego. https://cuylerballenger.com/About-1 Tue, 27 Sep 2022 21:50:55 +0000 Cuyler Ballenger https://cuylerballenger.com/About-1 I make films that take up the specifics of my family in order to reveal collective truth. As such my process is a combination of journalistic exploration and a working-through of internal conflicts. It's about an attempt to provide answers to the things I've been trying to understand, answers that can be found within the artwork itself. I’m currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California San Diego. contact: ballenger.cuyler@gmail.com