I BEGAN TO WISH



Julie Murray, 5:00, 16mm, 2003
The sea sucks the seed back into the ocean, the flowers fold like umbrellas, shoots recoil into hiding, in seeds that shrink. The plants accelerate their tremble and wobble and glass unbreaks all around them. Strawberries blanch and tomatoes grow pale. The father, leering, holds forth a flower and suddenly his smile fades to awful seriousness. In an odd concentrated ritual the father and son carefully tip over all the flower pots, laying the plants to rest and it is in this end, around the time he figures the flowers are talking to him, that the son wishes his father had killed him.

Since 1985, Julie Murray has completed more than 20 short films and has collaborated on numerous installation and performance events. Her work has been included in the New York Film Festival, Images, Toronto, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Along with numerous screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive in California, Murray has been invited to present her films at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Anthology Film Archives and Hallwalls in NY, Film Forum in Los Angeles, and at various universities. She has recently completed a trilogy of short films about Detroit and currently teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.