Girl Next Door — Julie Perini

Girl Next Door is an experimental documentary about the cluster of apartment dwellers around me in my North Portland neighborhood. I moved to Portland in 2007 knowing only two people in town. I scrambled to find work and friends. I lived alone in an apartment in North Portland, one of a little cluster of one-bedroom apartments in a compound of seven units. I needed connection with other people. I reached out to my six neighbors to see if they would allow me to interview them for a documentary about our compound, a video that I planned to circulate just among us. Two neighbors immediately said yes to this idea. I had a harder time connecting with the other four neighbors, so I fabricated interviews for these camera-shy folks in two ways: (1) I interviewed two people whose “life circumstances might be like my neighbors” and (2) I wrote scripts and hired actors to perform the roles for the remaining two neighbors. In the resultant Girl Next Door video, it’s clear which interviews are authentic and which are fictional. This experimental documentary is a big mix of fact and fiction, public and private, intimacy and distance.

Girl Next Door flat films

30" x 24" digital prints, set of 4 prints // 2010

For an exhibition of Girl Next Door at Pushdot Studio in Portland, Oregon, I created my first “flat films:” large grids of successive frames from a video, printed on photographic paper. I think of these works as “flattening” time in two-dimensions. I have since created many more such works to accompany videos in installations and gallery contexts.

Girl Next Door flat film

Girl Next Door flat film detail

Girl Next Door flat film

Julie Perini is a filmmaker and artist in Portland, Oregon.