Filmmakers to screen works-in-progress at Crosscurrents Heritage Center

Two acclaimed filmmakers will offer a rare look at their documentary work in progress when Crosscurrents Heritage Center hosts “Artists in the Farmhouse: Casey Brown and Julia Pello” on Saturday, May 30, at 2 p.m.

Brown and Pello will screen footage from their respective films, including one documentary titled “Indian Mounds in a Year,” which features footage shot in the Muscoda area.

Brown, a filmmaker, comedian and musician, previously served as Executive Public Relations Officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, where he earned an Emmy Award for his work exploring the artistic process of Truman Lowe. He also serves as Vice President of Chicago’s Koz Park Advisory Council. His connection to the region runs deep. His father, Ritchie Brown, began investigating Wisconsin’s effigy mounds in the late 1980s after visiting the farm of the late Frank Shadewald in Muscoda, who had sought help identifying unusual raised-earth formations on his property. Ritchie Brown, then a manager at the Ho-Chunk Department of Natural Resources, visited the site to survey and document the mounds, which hold sacred significance to the Ho-Chunk Nation and other tribes. Casey Brown accompanied his father on many of those visits as a child.

Brown’s previous appearance at Crosscurrents drew such strong interest that a second event had to be added the following day.

Pello, a professor and filmmaker in residence at Northwestern University, is an interdisciplinary media artist and educator who emigrated from the former Soviet Union. Her work draws on historical research to examine contested national narratives and layered local histories. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 and has received the Wexner Fellowship for Post-Production and a DCASE Individual Artist Grant.

Her debut feature film, “These Sounds Mark the Placements of an Inner World” — shot in archives and historical sites connected to modernist poet and Wisconsin resident Lorine Niedecker — premiered in competition at FIDMarseille in 2024. Pello has collaborated with inter-tribal American Indian, First Nations and Indigenous communities across Chicago, the Midwest and Canada for more than a decade.

Crosscurrents Heritage Center, located at 14640 State Highway 60, Port Andrew, focuses on preserving and interpreting the region’s natural, Indigenous and European settler history. Past programming has included storytelling with music, geology walking tours, and Ho-Chunk music and dance performances. Events have consistently filled to capacity.

Pre-registration is available at crosscurrentsheritage.org. To receive advance notice of upcoming events, visitors can subscribe through the website.