Convention requires every Catholic family to name at least one of their daughters in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary:  Mary, Maryanne, Marion…Marilyn. BAPTISM is about how filmmaker Marilyn Freeman could never get in synch with that name - Marilyn.  In a telling so intimate it seems to come over a telephone wire at midnight, Freeman delivers her own story, transforming a plaguing identity crisis into a one-of-a-kind family portrait.  An unexpected and impressionistic visual mix accompanies her voice while a rotating cast of lip-synching Marilyn stand-ins each enact the frustrating effort to conform.  A personal video essay on family life and childhood religion, BAPTISM is about mystical inheritances, a mother’s secret gift, and the ways we discover and define our selves through family. Comical and affecting and thoroughly original, Freeman’s story culminates in a transporting and life-altering noumenon: her own baptism re-imagined.

A NOTE ABOUT THE SACRAMENTS SERIES.

Several years ago I began writing personal essays and I quickly found all roads led back to Catholicism, the faith I thought I’d left behind in childhood.  It was remarkable, over and over I would find myself sorting through the influences of my Catholic upbringing.  As soon as I thought of writing a piece about having never liked being named Marilyn, I knew I would title it Baptism.  Within moments of realizing I would write Baptism, I recognized I wanted to explore my personal history in the context of each of the Church’s Seven Holy Sacraments.  The Sacraments is a series of anthropological examinations, from birth to death, from Baptism to Extreme Unction; I am re-envisioning the role of Catholicism in contemporary life and exploring the personal myths and mysteries of my own life.   As an interdisciplinary artist, as a writer, filmmaker, and video artist, the series naturally emerges in multiple creative spheres, the worlds of the written and spoken word, and the many universes of the moving image.             - Marilyn

                                                       

BAPTISM is the first in a series of video essays/installations based on the Seven Holy Sacraments.