Daniel Nearing

Sister Carrie is a bilingual feature film that explores definitions of romantic love as enforced over centuries by male perspectives. The story follows a tragic arc that is rooted in sequences inspired by three proto-feminist novels, including Theodore Dreiser’s work of the same name.

The project is the single largest artistic undertaking of the artist’s lifetime. It is an epic, tragic love story, shot largely with cutting-edge 4k pinhole technology to achieve a distinctive, pre-motion-picture-era appearance. Sister Carrie is an epic love story with silent film elements shot in Chicago, Montreal, and Paris. The film explores the boundaries of feminism in a time before women’s rights had vocal advocacy, and threads its perspective into the #MeToo present. Its focus is on a young woman who falls victim to consumption. The illness in the film serves as a metaphor for the way women have had to commodify themselves at great cost through history. The film is intended to move romantic viewers the way they might have been moved by its literary sources, but ultimately is an indictment of the male gaze.