Marcy McCall’s films are not obvious. She depicts the everyday: people in their own environments. She emphasizes dignity and lacks a political or narrative agenda. The subjects do not lead to anything beyond themselves. This is life for what it is and not for what it symbolizes. She doesn’t judge reality. Reality is just “there”; it has its own rules. She likes process, to record something that occurs whether or not she is there that day, something that speaks for itself, including a family meal.

Marcy is a one-person crew, and she edits. A bigger camera would change everything. She wants to disappear in their space. Her films reveal an intimacy, and distance. Mini-DV lowers everyone’s defenses to reveal something of themselves.

Marcy trusts in every person she chooses to film. She lived in the South and was a Georgian for 15 years. She had known the families and the schools for years before she filmed them.

A student of film, painting, and photography, Marcy is inspired by the domestic realism of Michael Apted’s UP series (England) and the Loud family in the PBS series AN AMERICAN FAMILY (Santa Barbara). Closer to home, she learned from Tom Palazzolo’s RICKY AND ROCKY that a Midwesterner can elevate an ordinary family ritual into a filmed observation. Later, becoming a mother deepened her sight on families, place, and the everyday.