In this early short, Lee Anne Schmitt and Lee Lynch craft an ambling, quietly profound portrait of a place quite literally close to home: the so-called Wash, a strip of wasteland by the Santa Clara River that backs on to Newhall, California, where the two directors lived at the time. As the duo take turns explaining in voice-over, this in-between space is used by and home to a diverse group of local residents, a balance that is quickly upset once the adjacent hills are turned into an upmarket housing estate. As the natural and the urban blur together, the mood turns pensive. Nostalgia can be felt for even the most unremarkable of settings.

A woman drives home by night and feels another woman watching her, a brief story at once opaque and ominous told first via intertitles before being partially repeated in voice-over. 16mm shots of a city by night, shop fronts, highways, street lights passing in a blur, muted traffic noise, snatches of music, the sound of crickets. Lee Anne Schmitt’s mysterious miniature draws a line between two women and a trauma they seemingly share. Undefined yet no less deeply felt, it remains as hard to fully parse as the horses riding over a prairie in grainy black and white or the figure in a dress lying on the side of a road, stretched out in the sunshine and leaves.