Sharon A. Mooney

Info

Sharon A. Mooney is a filmmaker originally from Richmond, Virginia and currently based in San Pedro. She works in experimental, narrative and non-fiction, all focused on investigating desire and the human condition. Her short videos and installations have screened internationally in festivals, microcinemas, and other spaces. She is a professor at a film school where she teaches filmmaking, post production, and punk rock cinema. 

Someone in school called her sense of humor childish and that's true at least 2/3rds of the time.

News

4/2025    Site update and new stuff coming, multiple works in progress

Statement

There is a constant battle between my desire to make beautiful images, and with expressing the darker themes lying underneath. If life is filled with contrast, I exploit it. Self- destruction is a sub-plot; making moving images is my way to subvert my own memory- tainted narratives.

I make work investigating desire and the human condition, weaving between documentary portrait, narrative and experimental modes. My own creative process always creates more questions than answers for me, resulting in rarely being satisfied with a single approach or result. One film leads to the next in an organic, but not particularly linear way. I am influenced by the idea of the “death-drive,” the explorations of the human experience, dark humor and the self-destructive search for the value in life.

Although I consider post-production my niche, the processes through which I work apply to all of the layers of filmmaking. If stratum is a layer within a structure, the structure is filmmaking, and the strata become the modes in which I work. My personal discontent stems my inability to limit the multimodal layers applied to my work.

Deconstructing and reconstructing images within a screen-space is related to the idea of the memory trace, or bits of memories engrained somewhere in our brains that won't let go. These fragments unconsciously resurface to change the way we perceive our realities. This process exists throughout out all of my pieces, as evidenced by framing, projections and/or lens transformations. Images create new and trigger old bits of memories. They not only inform each other, but they blend to reshape the meaning applied to visual stimuli and the traces themselves.

My goal is to find some sort of bridge to connect us to a larger oceanic/feeling of connection as people, connecting collective memories that may not have been destroyed. These are palliative narratives – my work explores the surface measures used to treat our conditions, but not the underlying causes. What is being said is rarely what is meant. Sound works against image, and in that struggle forms a deeper meaning. Strata and its Discontents.