CO-DIRECTORS Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher are a collaborative filmmaking team. Their first feature OCTOBER COUNTRY won the Grand Jury Prize at Silverdocs, received two Cinema Eye Honors, and was nominated for a 2009 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. The film is a haunting portrait of American poverty, described by A.O. Scott as a “Joyce Carol Oates novel rendered as a documentary.” Their next feature, OFF LABEL, an ensemble exploration of pharmaceutical use and abuse, premiered in competition at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, and was released theatrically by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Palmieri and Mosher’s “ROUGAROUING,” a short film about a rural Cajun Mardi Gras celebration, won Best Short Film at the 2014 Ashland Film Festival. Most recently, the duo expanded their short work, “PEACE IN THE VALLEY” into THE GOSPEL OF EUREKA, a feature-length documentary which premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, was released theatrically by Kino Lorber, and broadcast on POV last summer.
Palmieri and Mosher are multidisciplinary artists. They have worked in live cinema, collaborating with Daniel Lanois and Pop-Up Magazine, among others. The duo score their own films and often perform their soundtracks live in accompaniment to their screenings. Palmieri’s background as a music video director includes award-winning work for Sharon Van Etten, Beck, The Strokes, The Foo Fighters and many others. As writers and curators, they recently collaborated on a program for The Museum of the Moving Image in New York, curating a two-week run of Queer in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.