Prairie Public Shorts
Raymond Rea
5/18/2021 | 5m 49sVideo has Closed Captions
Profile on filmmaker Raymond Rea of Moorhead, MN.
Raymond Rea is a brilliant Moorhead, Minnesota based filmmaker who specializes in personal documentary and experimental movies. He is also an instructor in the Film Studies program at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His personal journey and his films are often intertwined to great affect.
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Prairie Public Shorts is a local public television program presented by Prairie Public
Prairie Public Shorts
Raymond Rea
5/18/2021 | 5m 49sVideo has Closed Captions
Raymond Rea is a brilliant Moorhead, Minnesota based filmmaker who specializes in personal documentary and experimental movies. He is also an instructor in the Film Studies program at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His personal journey and his films are often intertwined to great affect.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- It's important to say that I'm a filmmaker first, and a transgender filmmaker second.
(gentle music) My venture into making movies was I had a best friend who lived two houses away from me in small town Massachusetts, and she was given a Super 8 movie camera.
She used to ride a unicycle, so we ended up making, like, an epic Super 8 film about somebody riding a unicycle down a long driveway.
I went to one summer semester at NYU in New York City taking a cinematography class from a cinematography instructor named (indistinct), and I learned so much in that cinematography class.
I swear I'm still using that information to this day.
"Third" was really, I think, the first time I really started making films within the LGBTQ community.
There was a third gender character and their girlfriend, so really sort of a lesbian couple in San Francisco.
I had sort of a slow fade into being a trans man in the sense that, like many transgender people, especially from my era, I made a really valiant effort at first to like, fit into the gender that was assigned to me at birth, and it just didn't work at all.
At this point in my life, I've definitely lived more than half of my adult life as a man.
- [Voiceover] I know I'm a trans person, but I don't...
I guess I don't think about it that much.
It's just me.
- [Ray] I had so many friends come up to me and say, "Wow, we're not sure if this is right for everybody, but Ray, it's like obviously right for you."
- Looking across the body of his work, you start to see a lot of different aspects of his own life, even when he's telling stories about other people in the LGBT community, or personal docs about his family.
- [Voiceover] You are a target.
- It's really fun to watch his projects as a whole.
(psychedelic music) One of the pieces I really like is "Cat's Cradle," which is an experimental animation project, and part of the reason I like it so much is the sound design in relation to the imagery, because it's done in stop motion using a Xerox machine.
It has just, a really interesting aesthetic.
- The way that, in general, I describe my filmmaking is, it always ends up being an experimental hybrid, no matter what I try to do.
(cheerful music) - As a filmmaker, he has kind of opened a window for students to see different kinds of work, to see a different life perspective.
- So that's your great uncle, looking very dapper, and I would say that's in the 50's.
And all this stuff is...
This is in the Grove, clearly.
These photographs.
Crowds and crowds of young, gay men.
- When my great uncle Warrie died, my parents came to me and said, "We've got this photo album of Warrie's.
Do you want it?"
And it ended up just being amazing.
I think the photographs speak for themselves, or at least that's what I tried to have happen in that film.
How are you?
- Uh, I'm pretty good.
- I think that he's a very approachable instructor as far as professors go.
It's also really important that he shares his work as a filmmaker with students.
Ray has done many things for our program and for our students.
One of the things that I've seen is we have a more diverse student body because of his presence in the program.
- I just am so inspired by young people getting into film.
My ultimate advice to many students is, "After you graduate you are not gonna see a want ad in the paper for film director or cinematographer.
(laughs) You know?
It's just not gonna be there.
You are gonna have to be scrappy as hell."
- [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.
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Prairie Public Shorts is a local public television program presented by Prairie Public