Moving Portraits: Films and Short Works by Mike Mills

Listen to the Q&A with Project Los Altos featured artist and acclaimed writer/director Mike Mills and moderated by Gina Basso, public programs associate, SFMOMA. Mills’s films and videos often explore emotional spaces — such as loss, transformation, and sadness — and the complex identities driving his characters. The evening began with clips from his portrait work Paperboys (2001), a look at this dwindling tradition through the lives of five suburban paperboys, and from his new video from the installation A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone: Silicon Valley Project (2013). The latter, commissioned by SFMOMA for Project Los Altos, presents a portrait of the children of workers in the Silicon Valley tech industry, each sharing his or her own vision of the future. Following the Q&A with Mills, the event concluded with a screening of his semiautobiographical romantic drama Beginners (2010), starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, in which a young man grapples with his father’s late coming-out story and subsequent battle with cancer.

Ticket holders enjoyed tasty treats created by Blue Bottle Coffee.

Part of Live Projects 3