There are two movies I saw on TV about boys who were taken from their families and then returned to them years later. One boy was on a fun spaceship for years and the other boy was kidnapped and molested. These boys were never the same again and they just couldn’t re-integrate into the family. I saw these movies when I was little. I’ve often described them to people, always paired together. They are sort of the comedy and tragedy version of the same story and it is a mundanely spiritual story. Getting Stronger Every Day includes these boys’ tales, but they are like mystical objects placed on the living reality of the man storyteller. In other parts of the movie actual mystical objects hover in peoples lives without a myth or story attached. I like to think about how these dimensions interact simply and can be enacted: real life / story / worldly / spirit / video / flat drawing. —Miranda July
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know(2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, (Scribner, 2007) won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2002 July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher, and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel). Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden she designed for the 2009 Venice Biennale, is on view in Union Square in New York for the summer of 2010. Raised in Berkeley, California, she currently… read more