Kyle Joseph Petty

FILMS

monolithic tenderness
The News From Over Here
Returning The Bees
Lampoko
The Rocking Horse and The Mask
In Camera

About

The News From Over Here

HD Video - 1.33:1 - Stereo - United States & Eswatini - 2020

The News From Over Here is a structuralist travelogue film that recounts my experience of frustration and disappointment regarding my American identity while working abroad in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) in 2018. The social landscape and street life of the Swazi town of Siteki are rendered through long takes filmed by a distant, static camera, while my narration quotes concurrent national headlines from major U.S. news sources. The result is a languid document of 21st century political malaise. Anxious news media consumption unfolds against the leisurely pace of rural Eswatini, creating an associative mosaic of life in the global village that is equal parts bleak, absurd, comic, and sublime.