Gently Down the Stream, one of Su Friedrich’s early works, is built around a set of dreams revealing a conflict between her Catholic education and her lesbian desires. The texts are scratched directly on to the film’s emulsion, while the images are linked together tangentially, thereby evoking the state of bewilderment and dislocation characteristic of dreams.

Sink or Swim is a heartbreaking portrait of the tense relationship between Su Friedrich and her father during her childhood, her parents’ divorce and the impact of all this on her adult life. Narrated — as a distancing mechanism — by a child’s voice in the third person, the film adopts a structure with entries ordered alphabetically, referring both to her father’s profession as a linguist and a certain tradition of structural American cinema, particularly Zorns Lemma by Hollis Frampton (1970). Formally complex and emotionally intense, this film has become an important reference in autobiographical cinema.