"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.