She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and is a Professor in the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where she has taught film and video production since 1998.
[1] Friedrich's films regularly combine elements of narrative, documentary, and experimental styles of film-making and often focus on the roles of women, family, and homosexuality in contemporary America.
Her work has radicalized film form and content by incorporating a feminist perspective and issues of lesbian identity and by creating a remarkable and innovative synthesis of experimental, narrative and documentary genres.
[12][14][15] Through a series of twenty six short stories, Sink or Swim describes the childhood events that shaped a girl's ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play.
Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life.
[16] In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected Sink or Swim for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Lou is a 12-year-old girl who daydreams in a tree house, tries not to watch a sex education film, wins a rock throwing contest, and is horrified to discover that her best friend is taking an interest in earrings and boys.
Completing the picture are clips from a wide array of old scientific and educational films blended with the black and white images of Lou's world.
Beginning with the farmers in the Guatemalan countryside, we follow the bean from the exporter in Guatemala City, to the importer in Charleston, SC, then on to the roaster in Queens before it ends up in the Manhattan pushcart.