WAITING ROOM (2025)
Directed by Jessie Barr
Edited and sound designed by Rhea Bozzacchi
Footage sourced from Mary Poppins (1964) + Tombstone Territory (1957)
Field Recordings by Jessie Barr from Kyoto, Japan (Fushimi Inari Taisha) + Ojai, California
About
"Waiting Room" is an experimental film directed by Jessie Barr that weaves together a hypnotic interplay of found footage and original soundscapes. Edited and sound designed by Rhea Bozzacchi, the film repurposes imagery from Mary Poppins (1964) and Tombstone Territory (1957) which played in Barr’s hospital waiting rooms during cancer treatment, reframing them in a new, evocative context. These disparate visual sources—one a whimsical, fantastical musical, the other a stark Western television series—are juxtaposed in a way that explores gender, nostalgia, and temporality.
The film's auditory landscape, crafted from field recordings captured by Barr in Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine and the natural surroundings of Ojai, California, acts as both a guide and disruptor, recontextualizing the images and creating a liminal space between past and present, fiction and reality. The sound design blurs the line between the sacred and the mundane, evoking a sense of waiting—not just in a physical space, but in a psychological and existential sense.
Through its fragmented yet immersive structure, Waiting Room invites viewers to sit in the space between expectation and arrival, exploring how time, memory, and media intersect in our collective consciousness.
