"Skowhegan": Nao Bustamante

Los Angeles-based artist Nao Bustamante released the film “Skowhegan” in 2024, assembled from more than 120 tapes recorded as a participant during the summer of 1999. She waited more than twenty years to return to the footage and make the film, creating distance from her memories and feelings, and her perspective on these recordings from her youth. The School played a crucial role in her development as an artist, and the recordings brought out the way her time at Skowhegan influenced her practice in the years to come. As part of the editorial process, Nao’s selections emphasize the moments of discord, celebration, and community as the centerpieces of the film’s narrative. Very much a difficult decision-making process to whittle down hundreds of hours of footage, these selections build into a feature-length plot, derived from returning to personal memories.

Nao’s resulting Skowhegan shows an imaginary artist colony in which she and fellow participants portray the roles of “artists”, with all the joys, insecurities, and dreams that identification holds. As a young filmmaker guided by faculty such as iconic filmmaker John Waters, the narrative is a collaboration with her community of peers. The production process involved directorial prompts from Nao to the actors, often requesting specific script lines or actions, then improvised for delivery to build out the different stories and archetypical “artist” characters in the final work. After her summer at Skowhegan, Nao continued to explore collaborative filmmaking and developed many interdisciplinary film-performance works, including Silver & Gold presented at the Sundance International Film Festival, Park City, Utah and The Wooden People, which premiered at REDCAT, Los Angeles.

This trailer shows selections of the feature-length work and Nao’s signature practice of comedy, performance, and moving image. If you are interested in seeing the full film, please write to us at archive@skowheganart.org.