Cutting to the core of cinematic realism, Fountain presents the plotless character of human encounters. In a string of moments with the people who have presented themselves to Cumming’s camera for over twenty years, Fountain allows the accidental and the absurd to dominate our impressions. Storytelling is evacuated in the process.

Surveying 10 years of Cumming’s production (18 titles with optional French subtitles), this 3 DVD box set also features excerpts from a workshop given before a live audience at Visions du Réel, Nyon International Film Festival (Nyon, Switzerland), as well as 8 essays and images from Cumming’s work in different media.

Voice: off is the autobiography of a forgotten man. Brain damaged, body violated, emotions crushed, Gerry who rarely spoke has now lost the power of speech. The video camera is his prosthesis and he borrows the memories of people who no longer need them. How can this be a comedy? It is.

In Cold Harbor an old soldier’s regrets in a violent present.

Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past.

An urgent act of housekeeping, Culture uncovers all the hidden meanings of culture, from systems of knowledge and taste to active microorganisms. In the process, the artist confronts his rapidly decaying past.

In My Dinner with Weegee, Donigan Cumming weaves together two life stories. The central figure, a man in his seventies named Marty, remembers his experiences in New York as a young Catholic labour organizer and peace activist, his friendships with David Dellinger, the Berrigan brothers, Bayard Rustin, Weegee, and James Agee. This mixture of first-hand knowledge and gossip brightens Marty’s dark passage he is old, sick, depressed, and alcoholic. The other story is Cumming’s in his fifty-fourth year, as he examines his own radicalism in light of the “dirty wheezing beacon” up ahead.
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What if... Colleen’s life, in her own words, has been “wretched.” She was sexually abused by her father, betrayed by her husband, separated from her children, driven by her love for a heroin addict to attempted suicide. Colleen has survived by taking responsibility for her decisions and dreaming of a safer place. She has sometimes relied on the kindness of strangers. if only I marks another hot summer in crisis. Colleen presents herself, broken and whole, to the camera.
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System failure: a man repeats the story of a prison stabbing as something goes wrong with the tape.
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To be a man, to be a hero, to be a wife: these voices in conflict inhabit the body of a documentary filmmaker as he reenacts the climax of a western morality play, 3:10 to Yuma.

One minute, two mysteries: the shelf life of genius and why we try to make pictures when, as Robert Lowell put it, "no voice outsings the serpent's flawed, euphoric hiss."

The confession of a woman who took flight.

A camera on thin ice.

Christmas Eve. A man alone finds someone he can talk to.

A conversation about marriage and horses between two unseen men.

“I’m not finished. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. As far as I’m concerned I’m officially dead.” In his fiftieth year, Colin looks back on a life of drug and alcohol abuse. Four years into recovery, he is angry and articulate about addiction, treatment, and the romance of the street. In the chaos and claustrophobia of the ice storm,
Colin waits to be reborn. His erratic angel is late.

In Karaoke, an ailing, elderly man is listening to a performance given in the privacy
of his room. The singing is halting and cross-cultural - Inuktitut laid over Country & Western. Transgressive and mesmerizing, Karaoke distorts the landscapes of sound and body.

Donigan Cumming's improvisational style has criss-crossed the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, drama and documentation. In After Brenda, Cumming redefines the genre of popular romance. His abject hero is Pierre, a fifty-something male who has lost everything in the name of love. He is homeless and adrift, an unwanted guest with nothing to offer but a tale. After Brenda searches the hearts and rooms of his audience, seizing the evidence of sex, love and survival.
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