IS:
Intellectually fearless.
WAS:
Instrumental in SIFF’s first-ever virtual reality programming this year.
GOT:
Detained by the Nigerian state for seven days in 2007 while making Sweet Crude, a documentary about the oil-rich Niger Delta.
You will miss or misunderstand much of the brilliance in Sandy Cioffi’s work as a filmmaker and educator if you fail to appreciate her intellectualism. Cioffi takes theories about economics, power relationships, and class struggle very, very seriously. Post-Fordism and neoliberalism are as real to her as stones on a table. For most people, terms like “late capitalism” lead to a blank wall in the mind: These words mean nothing at all and cannot be applied to daily life. This is not the case with Cioffi. In her mind, the words bring into distinction the manner and mode of, say, our education system: how it operates, who it privileges, who it excludes.
This is how I can describe Cioffi: a raw ball of intellectual energy. This energy can be channeled into a film project, like 2007’s Sweet Crude (a documentary that got her into a whole lot of trouble in Nigeria, an oil-producing country with a ridiculously awful environmental record), or into virtual reality as a new dimension of filmmaking. Indeed, during a conversation I recently had with her about her advocacy of virtual reality, Cioffi repeatedly pointed out that she was in a race to define the theoretical language of this new art.
