SECRETS OF CINDY
1983, 15 MINS
Secrets of Cindy | Kleine’s first videotape, produced as a Museum School student, won First Prize at the American Film Institute’s Student Video Competition. The award was a production and post-production rig that allowed the filmmaker to keep making her work when she left school. Cindy and a classmate girlfriend giggle uncontrollably as they read aloud items from each other’s boy-crazy junior high diaries. In dramatized scenes, the filmmaker lives out her middle school, l’amour fou intrigues; and then there’s her twenty-something romance, which, now a quarter century later, appears as ephemeral and delusional as the diary entries of the 13-year-olds. In ways, this film, delving into the heartaches of love gone sour, is an exploratory work, returned to with more complexity, and higher stakes, in Passage (1991).