Monday, March 11, 2024

‘Adrianne & the Castle’ Review: A Grieving Man Builds a Shrine to His Late Wife in a Beautiful Documentary About a Love Larger Than Life

“Reality is for those who lack imagination” is one of the many witticisms dispensed by Adrianne Blue Wakefield St. George, the star and subject of Shannon Walsh’s documentary “Adrianne & The Castle” and a woman who also once proclaimed: “I am my own art.” Indeed she was. A gloriously Rubenesque force of nature who appeared to take her fashion and beauty tips from Divine, Adrianne was muse not only to herself but likewise to her adoring husband Alan St. George, who built a castle for — and his entire life around — his beloved wife of 30-plus years.
To read the rest of my (thumbs up) SXSW review visit IndieWire.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

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Friday, March 1, 2024

"A Film Can Be a Spark, and What Comes After It Is Where the Magic Is”: Elizabeth Nichols on Her True/False-Debuting Flying Lessons

Debuting at True/False (followed by First Look), Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons is a beautiful ode to a New York City Lower East Side artist as well as to the larger “dying breed” that once roamed the streets of Alphabet City, performing in its now extinct clubs. Importantly, it’s also a call to end rampant gentrification and a love story between director and character all rolled into one. The drama began, rather unhappily, with an eviction notice after NYC real estate owner/convicted fraudster Steve Croman bought the building Nichols was living in as a rent-stabilized tenant. Within months the “Bernie Madoff of landlords” had unleashed a harassment campaign (right down to the use of mafia-esque “tenant-relocation specialists”) that in turn led the filmmaker to join the Stop Croman Coalition, bringing her camera along to meetings to document the fight. It was at one of those SCC meetups that Nichols encountered her upstairs neighbor, a fiery-haired, septuagenarian bohemian named Philly Abe. The filmmaker then fell down a rabbit hole that lasted close to a decade, beginning with the discovery that Abe was a minor-cultural icon — an artist and performer and star of various underground movies (from other seminal underground figures like Todd Verow and the Kuchars). Their relationship eventually blossomed into a friendship that grew so deep that Nichols is now the caretaker of a historical treasure chest, much of it now resting at Howl Arts. The vast multimedia archive likewise features prominently in Flying Lessons, itself a cinematic fulfillment of the three-part promise Nichols made to Abe: to show her art, tell her story, and of course, fight for her apartment. A few days prior to the doc’s March 1st True/False premiere Filmmaker caught up with Nichols, a “25 New Faces of Independent Film” alum and an international educator, whose work in Tanzania has changed her own creative process and ways of thinking.
To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

"I Don’t Invest Hope in Celebrity or Leaders Too Much, But I Do Have Hope in People”: Mitch McCabe on Their True/False Premiere 23 Mile

While the pandemic spurred many (white collar) Americans to flee the big cities and retreat to the safety and comfort of living room Zooming, Detroit native Mitch McCabe returned home to the big city and instead roamed the often chaotic streets, eventually journeying throughout Michigan, camera in tow. What the veteran filmmaker-educator (and Flaherty Seminar and MacDowell fellow) witnessed was what we all primarily saw in that “unprecedented” election year: anger. At lockdowns, at those attending protests unmasked. And masked. At the murder of George Floyd, at the BLM movement, at Trump. At Democrat elites like Governor Gretchen Whitmer and President Joe Biden. And while the characters were likewise familiar — from white gun-toting militiamen to Black bullhorn-wielding activists — McCabe also dug deeper into this mess of humanity to capture scenes unfolding that were ever more surreal. A group of the aforementioned anti-government extremists on the steps of the state capitol defending, via an intimidatingly armed show of force, a Black activist’s right to free speech. A pro-Second Amendment speech in which he fervently addresses every “beautiful” person, including “women, men, and whatever they identify as.” Or an unexpectedly amiable guy standing outside his house (and lawn) plastered in Biden-Harris signs as he’s subject to jeers from his MAGA hood. So how does it feel to be the target of nonstop daily vitriol? “Sad,” he laments with a shrug. “Sad for the Trump folks because they’re so angry.” The result is McCabe’s endlessly fascinating and elegantly crafted 78-minute video diary titled 23 Mile, which serves as a much-needed cinematic reminder in this round two election year that uncomplicated narratives that simply confirm our preconceived notions do a disservice to us all. So just prior to the doc’s True/False debut today, Filmmaker reached out to the eclectic director, whose work runs the gamut from narrative to nonfiction, short to feature-length, and everything in between, to learn all about shooting in potentially explosive environments and extending an ear if not hand to the other side of the political divide.
To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

“It was sort of like that scene in Coming to America, where Eddie Murphy and Semmi are in the bar interviewing all the different women”: D. Smith on her Sundance-winning Kokomo City

At its heart, D. Smith’s 2023 Sundance-winning (NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award) Kokomo City is a music-laden, kaleidoscopically-edited series of raw monologues from four defiantly survivalist women whose voices are too often eclipsed by what the debut feature director terms the “red carpet narrative”: “When a fierce PR team puts a trans woman in a fabulous gown and has her speak like a pageant finalist.” (Aka the RuPaul’s Drag Race effect.) Indeed, while Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll (who, tragically and outrageously, was fatally shot by a teenager last spring), Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver are all Black, beautiful and trans, they are certainly not interested in making straight cis white Americans feel all kumbaya comfortable – nor straight cis African Americans for that matter. All are urban (NYC and Atlanta) sex workers with strong and deep opinions on a wide variety of topics – from the vulnerability of macho Black men to the fear of Black mothers for their sons (especially when those sons become daughters. Which according to Carter adds a whole other level of psychological complication for single moms, often forced to grapple with male abandonment for a second time). Not to mention the day-to-day reality of working in the oldest profession in the world, from facing life-threatening dangers to encountering unexpected hilarities (sometimes simultaneously). Just after the film was awarded Outstanding Debut at the Cinema Eye Honors (where the aforementioned four characters likewise received The Unforgettables non-competitive honor), and prior to its nomination for Best Documentary at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, I caught up with Smith, who’s also a twice Grammy-nominated producer-singer-songwriter, to learn all about this unusual passion project; one forged during three years of couch surfing after being shown the door by the music industry for walking “in her truth,” as the red carpet was rolled up back in 2014.
To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

“A War Without Rules”: Shoghakat Vardanyan on IDFA Best Film Winner ‘1489’

Had it not been for a spiraling rift that began with a pro-Palestinian protest on the opening night of last year’s IDFA, Armenian director Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 1489 surely would have been the big story out of the fest. It’s an unassuming debut by a first-time filmmaker who took the IDFA’s top prize for best film in the international competition. Regardless, it was a bittersweet win that could likewise be read as a consolation prize, as 1489 is a doc that Vardanyan certainly never wanted to make. Its coldly bureaucratic title refers to the number assigned to a “body of an individual missing in action.” The film centers on one particular MIA conscript in the most recent struggle over the disputed Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region — a 21-year-old student and musician (a pianist and saxophone player), and brother and son, named Soghomon Vardanyan. Simply put, 1489 is a distraught sister’s calmly clear-eyed, day-by-day, smartphone-shot account of her and her parents’ unenviable (ultimately two-year-long) search for her sibling's bones, some semblance of closure, and an ever-elusive hunt for answers. Just prior to the film’s US premiere at True/False, Documentary reached out to the first-time director, producer, and cinematographer with congratulations, condolences, and our own carefully framed questions.
To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

“We Always Sought Out Photos with Movement”: Klára Tasovská on Her “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” Doc I’m Not Everything I Want to Be

"The only way to survive is to take photos,” declares Libuše Jarcovjáková, the iconoclastic star/narrator/guide of Klára Tasovská’s visually arresting (and eye-catching titled) I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Nominated for the Teddy Documentary Award at this year’s Berlinale, the all-archival film is a globetrotting, black and white trip back in time (primarily to the 80s and 90s) viewed entirely through the rebelliously inquisitive eyes of this “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” (in the words of curator Sam Stourdzé). And words. For not only did Jarcovjáková obsessively collect images of both her defiantly unglamorous self and her decidedly adventurous life, she kept copious diaries of that wild inner-outer journey as well. Indeed, throwing caution to the wind, the outlaw shutterbug goes from hanging out at an underground gay club in Czechoslovakia (a country where she found herself “zigzagging through totalitarian reality”) to escaping, via fake marriage, to West Berlin. (Which “might be a step into the void but it’s a step forward,” she notes in her journal with hope. Alas, capitalism also left Jarcovjáková depressingly disoriented, unsure as to whether she was “outside or inside the cage.”) And on to Tokyo as an unlikely commercial photographer, an unsurprisingly awkward fit for a creative who’s always used her art to discover her “true self.” (In fact, Jarcovjáková much preferred returning to an unpretentious janitorial job in Berlin — camera in tow of course.) Just after the film’s Berlin premiere, and prior to its CPH:DOX debut, Filmmaker reached out to the veteran Czech director (2012’s Fortress and 2017’s Nothing Like Before, both co-directed with Lukáš Kokeš) to learn all about cinematically capturing a larger-than-life lenser.
To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.