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The Swan Tool

by Beth Pinsker, Senior Producer (see more from this contributor)

When she's not making films, July also performs live in multimedia exhibitions. The Swan Tool, which was commissioned by the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2001, features July as a woman on the verge of suicide who buries herself in her backyard, but one side of her continues to live and work. Surrounded by video screens on stage as she goes back and forth between her character's two "sides," she becomes part of the movie for its 45-minute duration.

July also works on Web-based projects, including Learning to Love You More, which gives visitors assignments and asks them to submit reports. They've had over 1,500 responses so far.

And in her copious amounts of free time, July writes fiction, works on sound recordings and is a regular on NPR's The Next Big Thing. She says the hardest part about working on her new film was that she had to concentrate on that one project for a whole year, without going off in a million different directions. "I'd have a spare moment and I'd think, Maybe I should work on a novel," she says. "And then I'd stop myself and say, 'You're crazy.'"

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