“Lightning in a Bottle” is a short film exploring the past, present, and possible futures of schools and learning spaces on the brink of disappearance. It chronicles the closing of Pittsburgh’s historic Schenley High School through the recollections of former students who recall the building’s life: from a controversial and highly fought-over closure of the school to its temporary abandonment and eventual transformation into luxury apartment units. While the school has been put to rest, its living memory sheds light on the current state of Pittsburgh’s public education landscape and the architectural ghosts that linger in plain sight.The film was first installed at the Andy Warhol Museum for my cohort’s thesis exhibition, “Holding Still, Holding On” in 2025.
“Lightning in a Bottle” pieces together physical archives, staged scenarios, and oral histories merging formal elements of documentary, fiction, archival collage, and the visual language of video essays. Its narrative structure is influenced by the Third Cinema movement, which challenges conventional notions of documentary storytelling from the West and global North, redirection of the camera toward voices and spaces that have historically left off-frame. My film rejects a singular author or protagonist, and voices who formally inhabited Schenley instead bounce between each other like the echoes of a Socratic seminar.
My interviews are of former students who attended Schenley at the end of the school’s life: a current public school teacher, a city employee who has become Schenley’s unofficial archivist, and an architect who was coincidentally assigned to work on the school’s conversion project into a condo. Interviews are paired with shots of current, previous, and fictional school environments, blurring the timeline of a singular past injustice into an ongoing cycle of school closures in Pittsburgh and beyond.
The film installation at The Warhol was accompanied by a free “Learning Guide” with questions and quotes of Pittsburgh Public Schoo teachers in direct conversation with the film and Schenley’s legacy.
Cast: Michael Bennet James Hill I-Shan Tam
Sound: Jessica Fuqay Petra Floyd
Production Assistance: Elizabeth Santos
Learning Guide Sources: Carol Dayas Barak Naveh Joe Ehman Walter Moser
