About the Film
Grandma Tressa Prisbrey built her first bottle house to hold her 17,000 pencils. This was the beginning of The Bottle Village in Simi Valley, Calif. At 84, Grandma Prisbrey is a vivacious guide to her brilliant houses crammed with objects scavenged from the county dump. At her wittiest-she sings, jokes with her older sister, and combs through the dump. The film is an exploration of Grandma Prisbrey's creativity, pizzazz and sense of the absurd.The film lovingly documents the interiors of 15 of her houses, including Cleopatra's Bedroom, The Round House, as well as the marvelous sidewalk mosaics -- all masterpieces of assemblage art and tapestries of artifacts from the first half of the 20th century.
Grandma's Bottle Village is part of the "Visions of Paradise" series on contemporary folk artists directed and produced by Irving Saraf and Allie Light. The other four films in the series are: Possum Trot: The Art of Calvin Black, The Monument of Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder, Hundred and Two Mature: The Art of Harry Lieberman, and Angel That Stands By Me: Minnie Evans' Paintings. You can find information about them at www.lightsaraffilms.com. They are video streaming on Folkstreams.net.
