THE OTO: GLOWING brings together eight artists whose stories are deeply personal, yet the film feels remarkably cohesive. What drew you to these particular voices, and what did you discover they shared?

BETH B: GLOWING evolved over three years, and it started almost by accident. I was working on a theatrical production in Hamburg, at the Kampnagel, and Jim Coleman—my longtime brilliant collaborator from Cop Shoot Cop and Human Impact— was composing music with this uncanny ability to conjure landscape out of nothing — the performers seemed to be moving through it. I wanted motion to stretch the boundaries of the stage, so I started building filmic backdrops that could move the way the music moved—like the screen itself was another instrument. My intuition guided me—motion instead of object, sound leading image—and this became the seed of everything that followed.

What I discovered, artist by artist... I don't know if "discovered" is even the right word. It was more like a repetition that kept showing up, over and over, until I couldn't ignore it. It’s that almost none of us actually leave childhood behind. It’s still inside us and I’m sometimes surprised by these unresolved parts of myself popping up unexpectedly. Something happens when we're small—a wound, maybe, or a silence, or the lies and secrets in a family or some kind of disturbance we don't even have words for at the time—and it doesn't resolve. It just goes underground. I lived in this kind of place for most of my life. Sitting in that unresolved place so that the choices I made were reactions to that past, and half the time I didn’t even know why I was making them.

Joseph talks about being a small child, left waiting in a car while his mother ran back inside for something. And there's this dread that takes hold of him—this innate childhood fear of loss, that leads him to believe that she's actually gone for good, slipped out some other door into a whole different life, and he's just sitting there, strapped in, waiting for nobody. That fear—of being left without even a goodbye—it follows him, I think, right into adolescence, where it turns into something else, I don’t know, something like this wish to just dissolve completely. Disappear. I think it has a universality to it especially with the younger generation. It has something to do with identity and a feeling of disconnection. How can they truly find themselves in this world of AI and fascist authority? And Rose Wood, her whole war with her own body and the world, it seems to trace back to childhood too. This search to get back to something simpler, an innocence, something she had before the world got complicated, before her own reflection became this thing she had to fight. Nick echoes this loss of innocence. He opens with this refrain, run, don't run, and by the end he's somehow face to face with himself as a boy, apologizing to that child for not protecting him the way he needed. And then Rose Tang says, near the end, "I am still that little girl"—and I don't know, it just lands with the same weight as Nick's reckoning. Like two adults, decades later, still standing right next to the child they used to be but with a vast understanding and desire to repair the damage. They’re so brave to speak so honestly about this deep searing pain.

What really touched me emotionally was how much of what shaped these people and myself, really I’d say all of us, happened before we even had language for it. There’s so much confusion about what isn’t said in a family. What a child can’t make sense of. A child doesn't have the words to say, "I'm afraid of being left" or "I don't feel safe." They just feel it. They carry it with them, without knowing they're carrying it. And it comes out later as art, or obsession, or rage— uncontrollable. Robbie's fear shows up as this loneliness that seems to catch him off guard, like he wasn't expecting it, a grown man surprised by how exposed he still feels. I love his art, his music, his vulnerability. And, he brings all of that to the film. He owns his whole being while still in a state of wonder, curiosity and wild imagination. Both Robbie and Joseph are reaching toward the mythic, a larger-than-life quality of themselves and it's incredible how tangible that becomes. Robbie's storm voice, from his song "Birdthrower" with his band This Wilderness—this sense of him claiming responsibility for the weather itself, scattering things into motion. And Joseph, later in his piece, uses this word, "transubstantiating"—like he's not just imagining himself becoming vapor, he's using the language of something sacred, something ritual, to describe dissolving into the sky. It's not metaphor to either of them, not really. It's closer to belief. Wow! The depth and poetry of these two people just blows me away.

No Anger's shows up as this five-year mourning that just won't resolve into simple grief. And none of these people know each other. They're working in different forms—song, spoken word, confession, dreams—and yet somehow almost every one of them arrives at a wounded place, from a completely different direction. I had no idea where this film was going but I chose these people because there was an intensity and darkness that they were willing to go into while reaching for a sense of catharsis. I don't think you can design that. I just found it, story by story. And then I tried to shape the film in a way that let their voices actually touch each other, so a boy in a driveway and a boy lost in the marshlands and a woman who's still, somewhere in there, a little girl—they end up supporting each other. And maybe that's what we're all looking for, whether we're in the film or just watching it. Something that helps us not feel so alone and isolated.

The film critic Andreas Döhler put language to this that I couldn't quite find myself—he wrote that the work keeps returning to the same handful of questions: power, desire, suffering, and underneath all the noise, hope. That we have to hold our own as thinking, feeling beings, with the courage to face the abyss without flinching. That's really what pulled these eight people together for me. Not a theme I imposed, but a childhood fear I recognized, again and again, in every single one of them.


THE OTO: The film moves through pain, identity, desire, and transformation, but it never becomes hopeless. Was it important for you to create a space where suffering and hope could coexist?

BETH B: For me, suffering and hope have to coexist—because if they don't, what's left? Suicide, or murder. And I don't want to promote either one of those. So, my approach with this film was to keep the stories vague at first, not specific, and let them reveal themselves gradually. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to leave room for people to bring their own imagination, their own experience into it.

I think we're so isolated—from our own bodies, our own souls, our own emotions—and that isolation is lonely as hell if we're not connecting with anyone. So part of this was talking about the things we're afraid to say. Living in that vulnerability, that awkward innocence. And honestly, what a gift it is when we can make a different choice—when we can let go of the stories we built just to feel safe, just so we didn't have to look reality in the eye.

It's fucking hard, though. I mean that. I have to actively rewire my brain, build new neural pathways, so I'm not just repeating the same behavior that doesn't serve me anymore.

Love and loss, identity and power, disability, the echoes of childhood trauma, the scars of war—GLOWING doesn't shy away from any of it. We go there. We confront what's underneath, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it hurts. But somehow, even in the darkest moments, it never tips into despair. There's always some flicker left—resilience, liberation, hope. That's what I keep coming back to. In the face of everything we don't know, everything we can't control... we burn brighter.

THE OTO: In GLOWING, personal stories become something larger — almost a collective experience. What interests you about the point where individual experience becomes universal?

BETH B: There are eight artists in GLOWING—poets, musicians, performers—and they each reveal something deeply personal. Their stories collide, they intertwine, and together they form this living dialogue with the audience. The themes are universal. So are the experiences. Throughout the film you hear these voices and memories of childhood—the fears, the helplessness, the stories we told ourselves when we were young and often remain. A lot of the time, we just didn't have the language to understand the adult realities happening around us, or to us. When we give voice to our fears, we find connection with others. It's the connection that can give us new perspectives. The drone work in the film gives us a different way to view others and ourselves. It's more expansive—it moves us away from being so fixed on our own pain. From up there, you can't see anyone's face. You just see how small we all are, and yet how connected. Even though a person becomes just a speck in the landscape, that's not a loss—it's a widening. We become the landscape."

But that widening doesn't stay. Alone in my own head, it collapses down to the same repeated shit going around and around—obsession. Torturous messages looping until I'm back on the merry-go-round. That's not just about pain—it's about the destructive attractions we keep choosing, even knowing we won't get out unscathed. There's an addiction to replaying certain behaviors. It goes back to family dynamics, to how we keep chasing love in places that were never going to give it to us.

That's actually where the individual becomes universal—not in anyone's specific details, but in the shape underneath. Almost everyone is looking for something in adulthood they didn't get as a child, usually in exactly the wrong place, because it's the only place that feels familiar enough to trust. You go back to the love you already know, even knowing it'll cost you. That's not weakness. That's just how the nervous system works—it reaches for familiar over healthy, every time, unless something interrupts the pattern.

What I found, working with eight completely different people, is that the specifics never matter as much as I think they will going into the stories. Somebody's story might be about fascist violence, somebody else's about a body of water, somebody else's about a car in a driveway. But if you sit with it long enough, you realize you're not actually listening to a story about violence or a car. You're listening to a person trying to answer the same question everyone in the audience is quietly asking about their own life: why do I keep doing this and is there a way out. That question doesn't belong to any one person. The moment someone says it out loud, in whatever form—a song, a monologue, a scream—it stops being their private shame and becomes something the whole room is suddenly holding together. That's the transformation I'm interested in. Not turning eight private lives into one generic message, but finding the place where the specificity of a life becomes so honest it loops back around into something everyone recognizes.

THE OTO: Much of your work, including GLOWING, explores people who exist outside conventional social narratives or push against accepted boundaries. What continues to attract you to these stories?

BETH B: I keep coming back to people who I identify with, who live on the margins—the ones society doesn't quite know what to do with. The misfits, the outsiders, the people carrying something most of us would rather not see. There's a reason for that. I think we're drowning in a culture that only wants to show us the perfect version of everything. Everyone's editing themselves down to a highlight reel before they even post it. My work runs in the opposite direction. I want to go toward the parts of a person that are unfinished, unresolved, still raw—because that's actually where the truth lives. That's where discovery happens.

The subjects I return to again and again—identity, war, sexuality, trauma, the different ways a mind can break or bend—these aren't niche concerns. People have been wrestling with this stuff for as long as we've existed. But I think there's an urgency to it right now, because so much of what reaches us has already been filtered, packaged, decided for us in advance by algorithms and feeds telling us what's normal and what isn't. And there's this quiet danger in thinking that just because a topic feels culturally "resolved," we don't need to sit with it anymore. But the people actually living inside these experiences—there are millions of them—and a lot of them still feel like they don't belong anywhere. Like something is fundamentally wrong with them for feeling what they feel.

Annie Bandez—Little Annie—was the first person I worked with on GLOWING, before I even knew it would become a feature. She's been a singer and storyteller in the New York scene for years, and she has this way of taking pain, love, and loss and turning it into something both stark and strangely beautiful. When I sat with her music and her writing, I found it kept circling back on itself—these dark, looping shapes, twisting and returning. I'm drawn to that kind of repetition, because I think it mirrors something true about how people actually live: we choose the same disturbance over and over, not because we don't know better, but because it's familiar. There's a strange comfort in the chaos we already recognize, even when it's the thing hurting us.

If I'm honest, this pull toward difficult material isn't abstract for me—it comes out of my own family, my own history. These aren't just other people's stories I'm curating from a distance. They're stories I recognize.

THE OTO: You emerged from New York's No Wave scene, where confrontation itself was often an artistic language. Looking at today's cultural landscape, do you feel that art still has the power to genuinely unsettle or transform audiences?

BETH B: I came up in New York in the late '70s, early '80s—No Wave, downtown, the Lower East Side when it was decimated. And that decay was the point. The city was broke, buildings were burned out, there was no infrastructure, no safety net—and out of that, we made this art that didn't try to soothe anybody. We wanted to disrupt everything. Confrontation was the language because alienation was the condition. You didn't perform for an audience so much as at them. It was noise, it was discomfort, it was bodies and sound refusing to resolve into anything pretty. That was the honesty of it.

I think that alienation hasn't gone away—it's just changed shape. Back then it was concrete and grit, a city that had abandoned its own people. Now it's a screen. We're more connected than we've ever been and somehow lonelier than we've ever been. The isolation is quieter now, more private, more curated—but it's the same wound. And I think that's part of why I keep making work like GLOWING. My mode of confrontation has changed—I'm not slamming my head against a door nobody’s opening—but the impulse is identical. You take what's underneath, what people don't say out loud, and you put it in the room with them.

Love and loss, identity and power, disability, the echoes of childhood trauma, the scars of war—GLOWING doesn't shy away from any of it. We go there. We confront what's underneath, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it hurts. But somehow, even in the darkest moments, it never slips into total despair. There's always some flicker left—resilience, liberation, hope. That's what I keep coming back to. In the face of everything we don't know, everything we can't control... we burn brighter.

I do think art can still unsettle people, still transform them—but it has to fight harder for it now, because we're all so used to being flooded with images, with noise, with content that asks nothing of us. The confrontation now isn't shock for its own sake. It's asking someone to actually feel something, to sit still long enough to let it in. That's harder to pull off than it was in a room full of likeminded artists in the 70s. But it's the same job.

THE OTO: GLOWING blurs the boundaries between documentary, experimental cinema, performance, and music. Did the film naturally evolve into this hybrid form, or were you intentionally trying to move beyond traditional documentary storytelling?

BETH B: I don't really think in terms of "what medium am I making right now." I think in terms of the idea, and then I follow it wherever it wants to go. Sometimes that's film, sometimes it's sculpture, sometimes it's an installation. If I decide ahead of time "I am a documentary filmmaker" or "I am an installation artist," I think that actually limits what the work can become.

And honestly, I don't even think "hybrid" is the right word for what GLOWING is. Hybrid implies you're combining two or three existing things—documentary plus performance plus music—like you're mixing ingredients from separate recipes. That's not what this is. What I'm after is something that doesn't already have a name, because the experience I'm trying to create doesn't exist yet in any single form. Documentary alone couldn't hold Annie's music the way it needed to be held. Performance alone couldn't carry Nick's writing the way the writing needed to breathe and connect to the landscape and music. So the film had to invent its own shape as it went. It's not documentary wearing a performance costume, or performance wearing a documentary costume—it's something that only exists because all of these elements needed each other to become whole.

I love this way of working. It’s more organic for me. It evolves. I usually want to map everything out in my work. It gives me a sense of control and security. But with GLOWING I have to look to uncertainty and my intuition. That’s fucking scary! Sometimes I felt directionless, like a ship being tossed at sea, then as I allowed myself to trust my voice it was like finding the calming waves inside me that linked it all together. I think that's actually a more honest and creative way to work. Real experience isn't segmented into disciplines. Grief doesn't happen in "documentary mode" and then switch over to "performance mode." It's all happening at once, layered, contradictory, moving between the concrete and the abstract in the same breath. So when I let the work become genuinely new—not a mash-up, but its own thing—I think it gets closer to how people actually live inside their own stories. That's the goal, anyway—not to blur the boundaries between forms, but to work in a space where those boundaries never existed to begin with.

THE OTO: Your films often return to questions of power, desire, suffering, and resistance. After more than four decades of making art, are you still searching for answers, or have you made peace with not finding them?

BETH B: I don't think I'm looking for answers anymore—I think I've made peace with the fact that the questions are the work. Forty-five years in, and I still don't fully know why I'm drawn to what I'm drawn to. It’s usually dark and confusing and you know, there's a pull, almost like a hunger, and I follow it. Half the time I don't even understand what I'm working through until I'm already deep inside a project. My films aren't about me, not literally, but they always end up circling something I'm trying to untangle in my own life. It's less like solving a puzzle and more like staying in conversation with it.

A lot of that comes from my family, of course. Primarily with my mother, Ida Applebroog, an extraordinary artist but also a mother who struggled with serious mental health issues—it marked my childhood, and I've spent much of my adult life trying to untangle what I couldn't understand at the time. Some of my most personal work has been about excavating that relationship—what got passed down, what got repeated, what I had to consciously choose not to repeat and that’s a lot! Really, how to live differently. That's not something you resolve once and move past. It's ongoing.

What has changed is how I hold it. Early on, my work came from rage—pure confrontation, throwing something ugly at the audience and daring them to look or to feel the way I felt. Now I'm still going to the same dark places, but I'm more interested in finding the light inside them.

Not softening the material, just... being able to hold both the pain and the healing in the same frame. Although Evelyn in her piece repeats the refrain, “I choose that pain”, I try not to choose that pain today. That shift didn't happen because I found an answer. It happened because I got older, and I got a little more capable of sitting with things instead of needing to detonate them. And I've never needed anyone else's permission to do this work. Funding disappears, institutions say fuck no, validation is elusive—I have to generate that myself, over and over, for four and a half decades. So no, I haven't found the answers. But I've stopped expecting to. The searching itself is what I have to practice.

THE OTO: Finally, what do you hope someone carries with them after experiencing GLOWING?

BETH B: What I want most is for people to leave with permission—permission to feel the thing they've been avoiding feeling. That's really it, at the core. We spend so much energy building these stories to protect ourselves, so we don't have to look directly at what actually happened to us. And I understand why—it's survival. But at some point those same stories that protected us start to trap us. So if someone walks out of GLOWING and feels even a small crack in that armor, if they recognize themselves in Rose Wood, or in Nick, or in Rose Tang or Robbie, and it gives them permission to stop pretending they're fine—that's the whole point.

There's something almost ancient about that release, honestly. Catharsis isn't a word I use lightly, but I think it's the right one here. The Greeks understood this thousands of years ago—that watching someone else's suffering, someone else's rage, someone else's grief, played out in front of you, can loosen something in your own body that logic never touches. You don't think your way into catharsis. You feel your way into it. And I wanted GLOWING to work that way—not as information you process, but as an experience you go through alongside these eight people, so that whatever you're holding onto has somewhere to go, even briefly. That release is not an ending. It's more like an opening.

I'd also love for people to carry the idea that they're not alone in this. That's what happens when you give voice to the things you're afraid to say—you find out other people have been carrying the exact same weight, just in a different shape. Isolation is what keeps pain alive. Connection, and the catharsis that comes with finally speaking, is what starts to loosen it.

And more than anything, I want people to leave with some sense of possibility—not a tidy resolution, because life doesn't hand us those, but a flicker. Proof that you can still be standing in the wreckage of what happened to you and also be changing, still becoming someone new. Some of the people in this film are right at the edge, right at the point of disappearing. Others have found a way to walk back from that edge. I don't think the film is telling anyone which one they'll be. I just want them to know both are real, and that even the darkest inherited patterns aren't necessarily the end of the story.

If someone leaves the theater having gone through something—not just watched it, but felt it move through them—and comes out the other side a little less alone, a little more forgiving of themselves, that's everything I could ask for.

We'll leave the conversation here.

If you'd like to experience GLOWING for yourself, the film is currently screening at The Roxy Cinema in New York as part of Beth B's film series. The program also includes EXPOSED and LYDIA LUNCH: The War Is Never Over, with post-screening conversations featuring Beth B and her collaborators.

Upcoming Screenings
July 15 - GLOWING
Screening followed by a Q&A with Beth B, Robert O. Leaver, Rose Tang and Jim Coleman. The evening concludes with a live performance by Deaf Dula, joined by Jim Coleman and Ev Gold at Pianos NYC.

July 26 - GLOWING
Screening followed by a conversation moderated by Tyler Nesler (INTERLOCUTOR Magazine) with Beth B, Joseph Keckler, Robert O. Leaver, Nick Flynn, Rose Tang and Jim Coleman. Live show and afterparty at The Parkside Lounge.

July 30 - LYDIA LUNCH: The War Is Never Over
Screening followed by a conversation between Lydia Lunch and Joseph Keckler.

August 1 - GLOWING
Screening followed by a Q&A with Beth B and Jim Coleman.

For tickets and the full screening schedule, visit The Roxy Cinema.