BFF FILM & FESTIVAL BLOG
"Cracked": Q&A With Writer/Director Lin Que Ayoung
Written by Marisa Bianco
Meliki Hurd (left) and Tatum Marilyn Hall (right) in “Cracked” Photo Credit: Lin Que Ayoung
The narrative short category at this year’s Bushwick Film Festival is perhaps one of the most exciting. The films selected explore a diversity of experiences, defying genre and encompassing a full spectrum of emotions. One of my favorites is “Cracked”, an intimate coming of age story directed by Lin Que Ayoung. “Cracked” is Lin Que’s thesis project for NYU Graduate Film. Before her filmmaking career, Lin Que was a hip hop performer and lyricist. A musical sensibility clearly permeates her film work.
“Cracked” tells the story of Toya, a young teen in 1980s Queens, who fights with her siblings and navigates her first love. Meanwhile, she is forced to confront a past trauma. In just 14 minutes, the film touches on a multitude of relationships and themes, and it paints a full picture of Toya’s interior and exterior worlds. The film, in part funded by the Spike Lee Production Fund Grant, has had a successful festival run. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and will now screen at BFF.
“Cracked” is one of the most arresting and emotionally gripping selections in the Narrative Short category at this year’s festival. I jumped at the opportunity to connect with my fellow NYU alum Lin Que Ayoung and learn more about this project. Read our conversation below.
Like you, I graduated from NYU virtually in May 2020. What was it like ending your time at Tisch online? Does the success of your thesis project, “Cracked”, in any way feel like a make-up graduation?
Graduating from NYU Grad Film marked the ending of a major journey in my life so graduating virtually had its pros and cons. After being in my thesis years, which included two years out of classes, I was looking forward to seeing my Tisch Family and having the opportunity to celebrate years of hard work together. It was difficult not having that opportunity, but we were able to still connect virtually and every last one of us was able to say something about their time at Tisch. This made it very special.
The success of “Cracked” is a joint venture and something that highlights the importance of all the incredible relationships I've been able to make at Tisch, the collaborators I plan on working with throughout my career. It's been absolutely a Blessing celebrating together as fellow filmmakers and filmgoers feel connected to the film.
This film clearly demonstrates an incredible attention to detail from you and your team, especially production design and wardrobe. I loved the way you give the viewer small glimpses into Toya’s world through close up-shots. It's the details in her home, the color of those details, and how they’re lit, that show us what Toya, her family, and Pooch are like. What details in the costumes, props, or production design were especially important to you?
Everything is/was important to me. I was born a detail-oriented person. The details are the underpinning that solidifies every other dimension of the film. It bolsters it up and hopefully imperceptibly draws the viewers into the world. It's absolutely delightful to know that you and others are noticing the decision-making that has been implemented to create authenticity.
Official Movie Poster for “Cracked”
Looking at your work on “Cracked”, where do you see the influence of your hip hop and music experience?
Music is so important to our culture. Within a millisecond, it can catapult us into a time and space with the efficiency of a state-of-the-art time machine. Its influence is so far-reaching. I had to work on post-production during Covid and I wasn't able to get the music that I wanted so I made the hard decision to record something myself, which in hindsight, made it even more authentic for me... being that “Cracked” is based on my childhood experiences. Prior to this, I would have undoubtedly told you that I was done rhyming. Life is funny.
You are open about the fact that “Cracked” is in part autobiographical. Did you always want to make a project using your own story? Or was it something that took time for you to become comfortable with? Has transitioning mediums from music to film changed your perspective on being vulnerable in your creativity?
Since I'm a former hip hop recording artist and lyricist, speaking from the heart is first nature and actually vital in order to connect with your audience. My aim as a filmmaker is to do the same. Film & television were Everything when I was a child. It showed me that there was a whole different world outside of my home, my block, my neighborhood. It fueled my imagination… and continues to do so every day. For me, my art, whether musical or visual, is about vulnerability. To me, my job as an artist is to have the courage to be vulnerable.
The ending of this film is incredibly impactful. During my first watch, I wasn’t sure how Toya’s father would react to what she told him. When his initial anger turns to love, and he embraces Toya, it feels right—because your film is full of love and warmth despite the trauma it addresses. What do you think this ending says about the relationship between anger and love, especially love that perseveres through trauma?
I probably get the most angry with the people in my life that I love the most. As a woman, I believe it is important to own our anger. As a society, I believe we are learning more about how to process anger in a healthy way. For me, emotions are signposts that help me navigate my inner life. It can get really tricky when I have mixed feelings. Anger and love can feel like they're on two opposite sides of the spectrum, but when someone loves you, they give you the space to process your anger. Anger can motivate you into positive action. Toya's father's anger quickly dissipates after he realizes what Toya needs at the moment. She needs unconditional love and that is exactly what he gives her.
Director: Lin Que Ayoung
Running Time: 16 minutes
Available to view from Oct 20-24 at watch.bushwickfilmfestival.com
Everything in the End: Q&A With Writer/Director Mylissa Fitzsimmons
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
Hugo de Sousa as Paulo in Everything in The End Photo Credit: Hello Charles LLC, Bearly There Media
Imagine Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert creating an apocalyptic, grief-inducing film of silent self-exploration. That is precisely what Mylissa Fitzsimmons has created in her first debut feature film submitted to this year’s Bushwick Film Festival. A self-proclaimed fan of the slow-burn, or in Fitzsimmons words, “the quiet film,” the Los Angeles-based writer, director, producer, and photographer achieves her own version of man-meets-nature-meets-end-of-the-world. Viewers follow Paulo as he travels to Iceland, where he contemplates his tainted past, his sequestered present, and his unattainable future. We were able to speak with Mylissa about the genesis of her film, cultivating resourcefulness for low-budget indies, and her cinemagraphic inspirations.
Congratulations on your debut feature film! Perhaps the equally simplest and most exciting question: Why this film? What was the genesis of Everything in the End? What was its gestation period?
Thank you, and thanks Bushwick Film Festival for programming the film, we’re very excited to screen there. It’s been a great, but challenging adventure bringing my debut future to festivals this last year. The pandemic has made this film and the whole experience making it feel so much more personal.
In October of 2018, I was in Iceland as part of The RIFF Talent Lab, and the whole time there I just became obsessed with the idea of shooting a film there. When I came back to LA at the start of 2019, all I knew was I wanted to shoot a film there but had no idea what, when, how. I then was asked by Raul, a friend from Spain who I had met at the lab, if I was interested in doing a short film as part of a series of shorts about the last night on earth. Nothing came from that project, but that simple question of, “What would you do if it were the last night on Earth? “ really planted the seed for the idea of a film. I have always been a fan of dystopian genre films and kinda ran with the idea that I wanted to do this “end of world” film but actually not make a film about the end of the world. More so, I wanted to make a film about the kindness of people at the end of the world, so instead I gravitated to a story that was less plot driven and more emotionally driven. I really enjoy films that make me feel wrecked and depressed when I leave the theater.
I needed to do a feature film, I wanted to move forward with my film career and I just couldn’t do any more short films. By August 2019, we had finished crowdfunding, found two investors who put in some extra money to get us through filming it, and by September we had a cast and another draft of the script. We had a 5 person crew shooting the film, 2 producers, and a 10 day shoot schedule. Basically we somehow wrote, produced, and shot a film in 3 months start to finish.
Near the end of the film, Paulo asks his friend if he is going to church. His friend replies: “No. No, it’s too late for that. No, I’m going up that mountain.” This, to me, is an imperative motif of the film: a rejection of orthodoxy, particular orthodox forms of comfort and security, and an undertaking of the difficult, the uncomfortable, of nature in all its grim, sublime beauty. In many ways, perhaps, it is Sisyphus himself returning to the bottom of the hill to push the boulder up again. As the writer, what does this “mountain” mean to you? What universal human mountains, like death, is the film forcing to the foreground?
That mountain represents very different answers to those two characters who climb it. When writing I felt that this mountain was the final symbol of love, a place where one returns often because he fell in love there. A place where someone was conceived out of love, and finally a place where in the simple act of going to this place a person is fulfilling the last wish of a loved one and in doing so can finally forgive and love himself. There’s the line in an earlier scene where Ana says, “Death reunites us with the ones we love” -- to me death is the obstacle to that love, and the mountain is where one is reunited with the love, figuratively and metaphorically. In order to get to that place Paulo has to go through the process of grief; it’s messy, uncomfortable, and emotional. The beautiful thing he discovers about it, is that he doesn't have to grieve alone.
Official Movie Poster provided by Hello Charles LLC, Bearly There Media
What was the process like of capturing such an intimate audio-visual experience of nature, particularly in relation to such a natural phenomenon like death? How important was the location - Iceland - to your work, and how did you make your scouting decisions?
Financially, as an indie filmmaker who is also a producer on a micro budget film, Iceland probably wasn't the smartest decision. But as a director who started out as a photographer, visually Iceland was my only choice. From the very beginning, I knew that it was important to me that the film portrayed nature in all its beauty, but that those landscapes also had to be a little unforgiving towards Paulo, making him feel more isolated, alone and grieving, forcing him to find comfort in others. Another thing that I really wanted to do was to work with our sound person, Kirbie Seis. I had approached her and said, “I want to make a really quiet film and I need it to sound like the earth is grieving, but also make it sound like Iceland.” I’d often look around and see her off in the fields or by the side of the road with her microphone just recording sounds. So when we got back she had this library of sounds of Iceland, and every sound was incorporated into the design, and then Darren Morze came in with this emotional score that incorporated that and just leveled it all up. It made me so happy, it really was beautiful to sit and watch the film and hear. I could isolate all the locations from the recordings and it transported me right back. It’s very subtle and really what I was hoping we could accomplish. To make a very quiet film that felt like the Earth was crying out in grief.
I’m going to admit something: scouting was all done via Google Earth and Airbnb. I picked a few areas that I had been to and knew what to expect visually. It doesn't sound very glamorous, but we also did not have a budget that allowed us many options. We really lucked out though. We only have 3 locations, and once we found a place where we were going to live, all those locations were within minutes away just by pure luck.
Your film’s aesthetic brought to mind projects like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert that retain equal parts spaciousness and intimate psychological profiling. What filmmakers and movements inspire your work?
I have my favorite filmmakers that have inspired me to be a filmmaker, but I’m not sure how much each one inspired this film specifically. I suppose on some conscious or unconscious level it’s all in there. I do know for this film I had a small list of films I asked the crew and Hugo de Sousa the lead actor to watch. I wanted them to get a better understanding of the tone and pacing. Starting with Kieslowski’s Blue, and then Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, and finally Kogonada’s film Columbus. All three really set the tone for me and were a great starting point for inspiration. I’m guilty of being a fan of the “slow burn” movement of filmmaking. I don’t like that description as much. I like saying “the quiet film” movement!
This film seems to question the meaning and interpretations of family. We see Paulo drift from one companion(s) to the next, even winding up next to a mother and her child, as if he himself is the father. How does family and its significance vary from character to character? How does this film contribute to the redefinition of concepts we take for granted?
Yes and no. These characters represent the stages of grief one goes through, but I made a conscious decision to make them all female for a reason. That being that each woman he encounters are these representations of his mom. Who she was and who she became and these manifestations of her in various stages are what he is processing, accumulating to this final acceptance stage with the mother and child. It really depends on the audience and how they feel and experience it. I wanted to give options actually because I wanted the space there for people to feel they could make that decision of how they feel about it all on their own. Really that is what I hope for, that people walk away with one feeling and then have a slow-think, and a couple of days later it hits them with a different feeling.
What is on the horizon? How do you think Everything in the End will influence your next project?
The frustration of having a film that has gone through festivals this last year has been that most have been virtual. A festival allows a filmmaker to connect, especially emerging filmmakers. This being my first feature, it’s been a bit of a challenge to connect. Virtual hasn't allowed me many opportunities to meet and connect with future film collaborators, so in a way the next project feels like it will be starting from square one again. So the horizon looks a little murky right now. It for sure involves another film with a small crew in an intimate setting again and obviously a slow, quiet burn. So if that type of film peaks someone’s interest they should reach out!
Director: Mylissa Fitzsimmons
Running Time: 75 minutes
Trailer available Here
Premiering at the Bushwick Film Festival Oct 20-24 at watch.bushwickfilmfestival.com
The Self and the Stranger: A Review of Language Lessons
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
Adam Duplass in Language Lessons Photo Credit: IMDB
It was only fitting that I took a friend I met on Bumble BFF to see a movie portraying the formation of an unconventional, technologically-dependent relationship. As we rode the subway into Brooklyn, we filled our would-be silences with lively and meaningful discussion about our favorite films, our romantic relationships, and our shared appreciation for learning. There were, as always, moments of vulnerability: some in an effort to keep the conversation alive, others to reveal ever-becoming parts of ourselves - our fears, ambitions, and turmoils - to demonstrate the authentic trust we were attempting to build with each other. We never really know the inner life of the stranger, however long we have known and loved said person, but we can make the valiant and potentially transcendental effort to try. And, not once, did we discuss our phones, friendship-meeting apps, or any other technological mechanism of communication. Nor do Cariño (Natalie Morales) and Adam (Mark Duplass) in Language Lessons.
Zoom feels quite camouflaged throughout the movie, though it is the only way we, as viewers, are able to see Morales and Duplass on screen together. It is never a point of discussion; it is simply a tool (an increasingly crucial one at that) to facilitate human exchange. The more contingent aspect of the film, and perhaps in our lives altogether, is the liminal relational space between two separate people, the self and the stranger, and the subsequent evolution of knowing, understanding, and loving.
Natalie Morales and Adam Duplass in Language Lessons Photo Credit: IMDB
Cariño and Adam’s platonic meet cute is predicated on Adam’s husband, Will, surprising Adam with one-hundred Spanish lessons taught by Cariño, who is based in Costa Rica. Their initial meeting, interrupted infrequently by internet glitches (that are surprisingly artful on film), is one of immediate kinship. Their bilingual banter exudes warmth and familiarity; while Cariño is certainly more reserved than her boisterous and chatty student, they meet one another with kind listening ears. The interplay of multiple languages, too, both emphasizes and marries their distinct personalities into a relationship that I and my friend found immediately compelling.
Like most relationships, however, tragedies and misunderstandings impede upon the pair’s closeness. Cariño consoles Adam in a time of loss. Cariño and Adam get closer, exchanging witty, humorous videos that reveal more of themselves and their personalities. Adam begins to assume Cariño is hiding a secret that keeps her in danger. Cariño lashes back at Adam, claiming he knows nothing about her. Adam beseeches Cariño to let him into her life. The art of conversation, the dance of getting to know one another continues.
I don’t state these plot points trivially. I state them so bluntly to emphasize how true-to-life Morales and Duplass kept their script, how effortlessly Morales’ direction captured a kind of immediacy and relatability which permitted us to see ourselves in these characters and honestly parallel the exchanges I have with the people I interact with on a daily basis. Whether it be the friendly Trader Joe’s grocer asking me if I found all that I needed on an isolated Thursday evening, or the mother I call when I’m feeling lost and overwhelmed, or the partner I both turn to and retreat from when I feel misunderstood and alone, all of my interactions are inevitable contestations that require choice in presentation, authenticity, and character, none of which are easy to determine. I can viscerally remember the last time I claimed to someone that they didn’t really know me, didn’t really understand what I was going through, not necessarily because they psychologically and pragmatically could not, but because I wanted to evade vulnerability and resist the other’s (or, in Lacanian and Camuian fashion, “The Other’s” or “The Stranger’s”) gaze that reflected what I was most avoidant of in myself.
Official poster for Language Lessons
Whether or not we confront alterity in ourselves and with each other is up to us. How we move forward and proceed with our own journeys in self-realization also rests in personal decision-making. Both choices, however, can be positively informed and influenced by art, especially in the cinema when the screen so often becomes a mirror. Films like Language Lessons succeed tremendously because they so beautifully explicate how hell really is other people, though not a demonic, stultifying hell. Hell, instead, is vital confrontation, intimacy, and, at its best and most terrifying, love.
Director: Natalie Morales
Running Time: 87 minutes
Currently playing in select theaters.
Trailer
Erin Brockovich, Stephen Sodorbergh, and the Argument for Environmental Regulation
Read how Erin Brockovich continues to hold relevance to current conversations around climate justice.
Written by Marisa Bianco
Erin Brockovich Photo Credit: MovieStillsDB
“It all comes down to what this one judge decides”
Erin Brockovich (2000 dir. Stephen Soderbergh) is different from the typical legal movie. There is no climactic trial scene where the orchestral score swells to its peak as the lawyer or the witness gets their big moment to convince the jury of their case. The protagonist is neither the lawyer nor the plaintiff nor the defendant. Erin Brockovich is about the paralegal, the assistant. The action focuses on the research and the work behind the scenes, not the courtroom arguments. It’s a working-class woman going to bat for working-class people.
The film, famously based on a true story, takes place in early 1990s Los Angeles where the twice-divorced, single mom of three Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts, in her Oscar-winning role) has reached a low point after being injured in a car accident and losing the resulting personal injury suit. Using her stubborn persistence, she snags a job at her former attorney’s office (Ed Masry, played by Alfred Finney), where she discovers evidence that the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has poisoned residents of the nearby town, Hinkley, CA, with chromium contaminated groundwater. Erin takes the lead on the case, gathering evidence herself, getting to know each and every plaintiff, and blowing past anyone in her way with savage verbal takedowns.
This film has more to offer than similar 90s studio movies because it is refined by the Soderbergh auteur style. We can see this in the warm, intense yellow filter through which we experience Southern California, contrasted by the clinical, unsettling blue light of the courtroom scene when the PG&E suit is allowed to go forward.
However, in the vein of the uplifting 90s-2000s mid-budget studio film, Soderbergh doesn’t dwell on the gravity of the situation in Hinkley. There is never any doubt in the viewer’s mind that Erin and Ed will be successful. I was most invested in Erin’s story at the beginning, when we feel the confines of her poverty and her desperation, as she skips meals to feed her kids. Susannah Grant’s script and Roberts’ performance do a great job of portraying the emotional realities of Erin’s financial struggle. After Erin is hired and really gets going on her investigation, the film's stakes start to fall away. Every time the lawsuit hits a roadblock (and it hits many), Erin overcomes it with ease. Ed wants to back out because the suit is growing too expensive. Erin convinces him to change his mind. Do they need a piece of evidence linking PG&E Corporate to PG&E Hinkley? A mysterious man shows up with the necessary documentation in one of the next scenes. The fact that this is a movie based on a true story makes it obvious that the legal battle will end in victory for Erin. If not, why would the movie have been made? This gets to the heart of my problem with the film—Soderbergh fails to convey the emotional stakes of the story to the viewer.
Erin Brockovich Photo Credit: MovieStillsDB
And the stakes are high, especially for the residents in Hinkley. In environmental law, people have two options to monitor polluting corporations: regulation and litigation. The film shows us how arduous and even futile litigation can be. The plaintiffs in Erin Brockovich are looking for retribution after they’ve drunk the poison water after the deadly damage has been done. They have neither the time nor money to go to trial, so they are essentially forced to choose binding arbitration.
And arbitration is scary. There is no jury. As Erin says to Ed in disbelief, “It all comes down to what this one judge decides.” “This one judge” could have a great rating from attorneys, or their rating could be filled with reports of abuse of power and lack of knowledge. If it’s a case in federal court, it could be a political appointee, chosen for their pro-corporate or anti-regulation stance. Our resources are much better spent preventing pollution and other types of environmental harm through regulation rather than attempting to punish the polluters after the fact in court.
I’d like to think that if this film were made today that it wouldn’t stop at condemning the responsible corporation. I think many modern filmmakers would examine why a profit-motivated corporation, given a monopoly by the government, is more concerned with its profit margins than its responsibility to the community it serves. The fact is that 634 citizens (the number of plaintiffs in Erin’s case) shouldn’t be the underdogs in a lawsuit; it shouldn’t be a David v. Goliath metaphor.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go listen to 90s Sheryl Crow songs while channeling my inner Erin Brockovich, taking down the greedy corporations and protecting the rights to clean air and water.
Erin Brockovich
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Year: 2000
Trailer
Streaming free on Peacock
Baring More Than the Soul
A critical analysis of how sex scenes are shot and the way women are depicted on the screen.
Written by Alyssa Cosme
Photo Credit: Jason Laveris via Getty Images
As she promoted her new Netflix film The Last Letter from Your Lover, actress Shailene Woodley discussed her most recent roles with The Hollywood Reporter. She talked about shooting sex scenes, by critisizing the way women are depicted on the screen. Most actors know the ways they must expose their bodies in intimate scenes, but most audience members are unaware, causing some scenes to go over the heads of viewers. It made me think about how sex scenes in television shows and movies have been portrayed over the past few years. Woodley goes on to say that “Oftentimes in movies, you see two people having sex and the woman has her bra on, and in real life, I don't think I ever did that, sex with a bra — or very, very rarely.” It was more important to capture whatever the director envisioned. Woodley described the type of relationship an actor could have to successfully hit the mark when it comes to filming intimate scenes. She shares:
“I always sit down and talk with the director, the other actor. We always have conversations of, ‘Is nudity necessary? Is it going to distract from the scene, add the scene?’ We know exactly what the boundaries are. And I’ve never been in a situation where those things haven’t been honored.”
It is very important for actors to be vocal and honest with their directors, not only because it will make everyone on set more comfortable, it will ultimately convey realistic and organic storytelling. Woodley is no stranger to filming intimate movies. She is well known for her dark projects such as Big Little Lies and White Bird in A Blizzard. Although, Big Little Lies contained sexual violence, the context was important for the narrative in this particular series. I think she is the perfect person to expand upon this topic because she is very open with intimacy in her work. This comes from an actress who had her big break starring as a pregnant teenager in the ABC family drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a groundbreaking show when it premiered in 2008.
Photo Credit: Normal People via IMDB
Moreover, I wondered how many other people thought about the ways sex scenes in the media have taken a toll on the overall arc of the narrative. So what purpose do these scenes serve? I realized that audiences enjoy shows on streaming services that leave little to the imagination in their sex scenes, such as Normal People which aired on Hulu and Bridgerton which appeared on Netflix. I found that it was the closeness of these stories that kept the shows engaging and overall fun to watch. And by that, I mean that this kind of content can be impactful for people. It may make them look at themselves differently by how sex is represented and affect them negatively or positively, depending on the subject matter and the person. Overall, it is the way we engage with intimacy. It was the perfect feeling that many people might have felt watching dramas back in the day. It could be the ones that had us at the edge of our seats, waiting to see what happened next week. It could be the reason so many people lined up to see movies like Fifty Shades of Grey. Whatever the reason, there is definitely something to expand upon.
Photo Credit via Netflix
The idea of including sex scenes can be tricky because you wonder if the filmmakers decided upon it because they want to advance the narrative and the potential character development or for the sake of shock factor. Woodley highlights “realism over modesty” when it comes to her roles. Perhaps she wanted to convey that she values how realistic and natural these scenes are and pointing out the fact that wearing bras is just an idea that society is holding back because she says so herself that it is not something that she has done. The fact that we are having these conversations is significant because it is important to mention how realistic intimate scenes can be for actual people. Also, being able to talk about topics like these can be more accepted for mainstream purposes. For so long women were silenced when it came to discussions on sexuality and nudity in the media. And as time has gone on, we have become accustomed to intimate scenes and possible comfort in the relationships we see on screen. In some instances, it seems as though modesty is not an issue. In recent times, baring more than one’s soul is nothing out of the ordinary. It is in fact, very typical in any kind of show or movie. I’ve noticed this level of intimacy in many genres across all media platforms more than ever before. This certain kind of content has continued to to be explored and keeps the conversations open and less restrictive, which I appreciate as an avid movie/tv show watcher.
We can make up our own minds about how much intimacy we want to see, on the big or small screens. Perhaps this can make someone else think about the way they watch films or how they view people in general.
Alyssa is a recent Marymount Manhattan College graduate where she focused on script writing and media studies. She continues to write while residing in NYC.
A Letter to My Lost Elders
Thinking through queer lineage, grief, and Chantal Akerman.
Written by Jay Graham
Photo Credit via Criterion Collection
I watched Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) in the belly of our Covid winter. Snow had been accumulating for a few days, its white mass swallowing tree trunks and lifting the lines from the landscape. Though I hadn’t been to mass since I was a kid, I noticed I was kneeling before the laptop screen, propped at the foot of the bed, while fat flakes flooded the window in my periphery. My legs folded beneath me so easily I wondered if they remembered the pose. The roof, arched above my head, must have been bending a little under all that weight.
Though she often acted in her movies, Akerman never appears in News from Home. Instead, she offers only her voice, which reads aloud a series of letters she has received from her mother after moving from Brussels to New York: “Write soon. I’m anxious to hear about your work, New York, everything.” The letters detail daily errands, minor illnesses, and updates about family friends, but they are also saturated with affection, anxiety, and appeals to write back. Akerman’s monotone performance only exaggerates the letters’ emotive content: “You know I live for your letters.” The intimacy of this voice-over collides with the film’s rigid frames. A fixed camera captures extended shots of New York—its sidewalks littered with newspapers, its humming subway stations, its streets washed in ambient traffic noise, its pedestrians, their faces grainy, its storefronts, their neon signs blinking on, off.
I am tempted to read these long shots as return letters: You asked me about my life, this place. Here is New York. Here is your absence on East 45th Street. I take the subway to record roads filled with bodies that aren’t yours. It sounds like light machinery, tires rolling over pavement, gravel falling in construction sites, train brakes screaming against steel beams, a mesh of voices, vehicles pushing through thick air, my voice reading over your words.
Photo Credit via Criterion Collection
To many, Akerman’s name is sacrosanct. We speak of her with a reverence that often borders on obsession, and the seismic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has held a place in the canon of feminist and experimental film since its release in 1975. The daughter of a Belgian survivor of the Holocaust, Akerman frequently made art about her mother, and her body of work is deeply inflected by themes related to generational trauma, gender, quotidian rituals, and alienation. She is also among the first filmmakers to display queer sex free of spectacle. In je tu il elle (1974), her first feature film, sex escapes moralism. Akerman’s character hooks up with a truck driver and listens to him speak of the obligatory marital sex he participates in out of a sense of paternal duty, then travels alone to an ex-girlfriend’s place and devours several sandwiches slathered with chocolate spread before they fuck.
To be sure, Akerman expressed ambivalence about the categorization of sexuality and preferred to eschew neat labels for the messiness of experience. Yet, I have invented her into my queer family. What does it mean that I’ve positioned Akerman as a queer elder when she never embraced the term herself? In assuming her as a gay icon of sorts, there is the danger of reproducing the linguistic and conceptual limitations she hoped to evade. There is danger in claiming her as kin at all. Put more simply, it’s a narcissistic move, netting her in these frames of reference and this particular phase of the evolving queer lexicon.
Photo Credit via Criterion Collection
I should admit now that when I first watched News from Home, I was in the midst of an epistolary fever, ripping the covers off magazines all winter to make envelopes for the letters I was sending to my own mother 2,800 miles away. I folded the edges carefully the way she taught me, bled pens dry, described my daily tasks, recited my routines, made my appeals. I wanted to tether myself to various forms of family in the same way I wanted to reinscribe distinguishing features into the land around me after the snow had softened them. That is, I wanted to place myself.
Re-watching News from Home during Pride month, I imagined those first few shots as allegory. Here is the absence of so many of our queer and trans elders, whose lives were taken by AIDS, depression, mass shootings, overdoses, bashings, homicides. Once again, I watched with my feet tucked beneath me, hip bones stacked on top of ankles, blood pooling in my knees. This time, I noticed the silence. True to her spare style, Akerman splices the narration in News from Home with voicelessness. These stretches of silence occupy the film in the same way Akerman and her mother do, the same way our lost community members inhabit our consciousness if not our cities.
Of course, I don’t mean to say that my hands are left empty every time I reach for queer and trans elders—I mean that I keep repeating the gesture. I watch News from Home again, replay Arthur Russell’s songs, email that old professor, dog-ear the same pages in Giovanni’s Room, in Stone Butch Blues, write to the distant relative, return to that lesbian bar that’s been around since 1987, mimic the aesthetics. Maybe it’s no surprise that in Akerman’s study of alienation, familial absence, longing, and guilt, I feel a sense of kinship. To call yourself lost is another way to name yourself.
Born and raised in Seattle, Jay lives in Bushwick. You can typically find them making mixes, biking around Brooklyn, or reading outside Topos.
Common Language: Lingua Franca and Auteurship
Isabel Sandoval is an auteur “staking her claim” in cinema. Sandoval’s control over her work is an important ownership, and in the film Lingua Franca, supports the film's themes of trans identity, addiction and immigration.
Written by Lex Young
Photo Credit via Lingua Franca trailer on Youtube
Isabel Sandoval is an auteur who has been creating her own home in cinema. Lingua Franca, which she wrote, directed, edited, starred in and produced, is a film where this control supports its trans identity and immigration themes. Each character is in conversation with their autonomy, home, and family. The control Sandoval exhibits over the film and its narrative is empowering, solidifying her importance in modern cinema and the vital need for trans folks and immigrants to have authorship over their narrative in cinema and life.
In Lingua Franca, each character grapples with control. The film begins with Olga, an elderly Russian immigrant who struggles with her memory. We see her in a kitchen, reminiscent of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, women who meander through routine, domestic ritual, finding comfort in this routine, but not happiness, a forced expectation of femininity. Odes to Akerman can be seen throughout the lonely landscapes of New York beautifully captured by Sandoval. This is a marker of Akerman’s cinema as well, emphasizing a separation between self, identity and place. Two women who are looking for themselves in a vast and crowded city, a struggle to find home.
The character of Olivia, played by Sandoval herself, is bound in constraints of care, a duty to her family, her job as a caretaker for Olga, and someone she paid to marry her for a green card. Throughout the film, she speaks with a faceless mother, whose voice we only hear through the phone, and she is seen preparing care packages for her family back in the Philippines. This faceless mother is a striking absence of an image, just a distant voice, emphasizing the separation between two homes and family.
Insecurity can be found in the character of Alex, the grandson of Olga, his own identity wrought with the instabilities of addiction and toxic masculinity. This is shown by Sandoval, through the character of Olivia, displays Alex and his toxicities with an empathy that comes from desire. Sandoval plays with this idea of a savior. Alex is someone who desired Olivia without knowing her fears of deportation, her status as an immigrant, her loss of a green card marriage, and her trans identity. When he does find out it’s through deception and influence from his friends who spew transmisogynist slurs. Sandoval beautifully depicts the ongoing and never ending fight with policy, violence and fear that plague immigrants and trans folk alike.
Lingua Franca ends with Olivia’s rejection of Alex’s marriage proposal, and Olga once again struggling to remember herself and routine. It’s an open ending, not exactly a conclusion but a cycle; we’re empowered all the same with the knowledge of Olivia’s choice of a new beginning. Olivia speaks on the phone to her mother of another job and that she met someone new. Yet we’re left alone with Olga, in her bleak kitchen, wondering about our place in the world. It’s a nod to the continuous journey of finding comfort in one’s own identity, and the continuous struggles of trans folks and immigrants.
Isabel Sandoval highlights the importance of trans folk and immigrants controlling one’s narrative. Her auteurship is vital in her work, and to the empowerment of trans and immigrant voices, a pedestal formed with her own hands.
Lingua Franca
Director: Isabel Sandoval
Year: 2019
Streaming on Netflix
Lex Young is currently watching movies, writing and making things in New York. Catch more of their work on Instagram
“Here Comes the Content:” A Review of “Bo Burnham: Inside”
Bo Burnham stuns in his new Netflix special "Inside," probing us all to contemplate performativity, authenticity, and the troubled space of the Internet.
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
Photo Credit via Netflix
A disclaimer: prepare for hypocrisy. The following is an amateur review of a non-amateur comedy special about how internet-users are losing their mental health to Silicon Valley capitalists and becoming incrementally deluded in a very, very chaotic world. I am an internet-user. I am a white woman on Instagram who has certainly snapped pictures of “a simple glass of wine,” though I’ve poked fun at others for doing the same. I will happily watch YouTube compilation videos of John Mulaney on talk shows I’ve seen three times already. And now, I’m diligently going to explain to you why you should take note from Burnham, sing a song about the tragedy of our dying planet, put down the phone, and go outside. I sound like an authoritative figure on this kind of content, right?
Another imperative admission: I had never heard of Bo Burnham before watching this special (collective, pitying gasp). I knew nothing of his public upbringing on YouTube, his previous specials on Netflix, or his directorial debut Eighth Grade. I didn’t know that he used satirical ballads and pop songs to convey ever-ironic messages about culture, nor would I have fathomed my substantiated ability to watch and listen to each and every one of his specials with undivided attention. But now I know.
So where to begin with a special that encompasses the spectrum of human emotion performed by a stage persona whom we shouldn’t mistake for the real Burnham? This last note is up for debate, of course (artistic subjectivities, am I right?), but I wouldn’t take anything Burnham says or does in a moment of perceived vulnerability at face value. Afterall, a segment of Burnham playing a video-game of his projected isolationism subliminally reoccurs before the skit begins (around the fourteenth-minute), hinting that the entire show is a comedic mind-trick of the creator’s own doing, unsurprising given Burnham’s performance record.
Photo Credit via Netflix
The show is a visual-sonic masterpiece. Burnham showcases exquisite command over the song-writing, camera shots, light fixtures, and editing tempo. The latter is demonstrated in his tonal shift following the intermission. What begins as an upbeat, slightly demoralizing, white-saviour apology — cue “Comedy” and “Problematic” — becomes an unsparing, capitalism-critiquing, mental-health discussion — hello “All Time Low” and “That Funny Feeling.” Burnham reuses lyrics that take on new meaning by the end of the screening; “look who’s inside again” repeats itself with a solemnity that no longer feels mocking, and “you’re really joking at a time like this” reinforces the reality and severity of global circumstances that Burnham really doesn’t find very funny at all.
It’s increasingly hard to distinguish what in the “outside” world exists with a humbled authenticity and what exists for attention, and as I was researching for this review, the oversaturation of “Inside” opinions certainly felt like the latter. Are we (novice volunteers and salaried film critics alike) writing to truly celebrate Burnham’s achievement in accurately portraying the demise of a technologically-dependent society, or are we simply trying to be the first to over-analyze a creative venture that should be contemplated privately, introspectively, and thoughtfully? Perhaps the choices aren’t quite as binary as that, but when Burnham asks if it's necessary for every single person to express “every single opinion that they have on every single thing all at the same time,” there seems to be a pretty clear answer. He even parodies YouTube “reaction videos;” we, as public commentators, are quite literally the subject of his joke.
We’re not made fun of alone, however, because Burnham is also the butt of his joke. He mentions that, as the star of his self-directed special, he isn’t shutting up either, and he refuses to explain himself for it. Just as he sings in his infamous satire “Art is Dead,” we all just seem to be little attention attractors — and we’re lonely. Pandemic circumstances certainly haven’t made those traits any less palpable.
I think, ultimately, we’ve collectively determined that I’m not here to tell you what lessons are to be learned from “Inside,” but if I can relay one of Burnham’s most interesting suggestions, maybe, just for a second, we should all “shut the f*** up.”
Director: Bo Burnham
Running Time: 87 minutes
Available on Netflix
Stream the “Inside” album on Spotify and Apple Music
The Power of Positive Media Representation for Trans Youth
Media has played a large role in reshaping public perception of the LGBTQ+ community, creating a more accurate and positive representation that lead to advancements in civil rights. As an anti-trans youth bill sweeps through state legislatures in 2021, progress must be made in the media to advance the representation of trans people.
It’s been 52 years since the Stonewall Uprising snatched the media’s attention and thrust the gay rights movement into the public eye, allowing millions of people to witness the injustices experienced by the LGBTQ+ community on a daily basis. Thanks to the diligent work of activists over the decades, depictions of gays and lesbians in the media became more positive, leading the culture to shift favorably towards gay rights — anti-discrimination laws have been passed to protect LGBTQ+ people, who can now serve openly in the military without punishment and whose right to marriage equality is now federally protected under the law. Considering the progressive strides made in recent years, it’s all too easy to accept the status quo, to forget how society became as accepting of the LGBTQ+ community as it is today, and to ignore the continued legislative backlash currently targeting transgender youth. Without persistent awareness and continued activism, however, progress will halt or even reverse course.
Before the gay rights movement making its foothold in pop culture, the public perception of the gay lifestyle was widely one of fear and ignorance. If homosexuality was mentioned in the media at all it was painted as sick or perverted, a deviant way of life led by villainous criminals or the pitifully weak, both deserving of terrible fates. Think of the cross-dressing serial killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or The Children’s Hour (1961), a story centered around two school teachers who are accused of lesbianism that ends with one of them committing suicide because she is so appalled by her homosexual longings. These damaging stereotypes persisted throughout most of film and media until GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) was formed by a group of journalists and writers in 1985. GLAAD started as a response to defamatory news coverage of the HIV/AIDS crisis that disproportionately affected the gay community. What began as a protest outside of The New York Post’s office building grew into a national effort to reshape the media’s derogatory narrative on homosexuality.
Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn in The Children’s Hour (1961) - ALAMY
By 1990, as GLAAD grew in size and influence, the organization began hosting its own media awards ceremony honoring fair and inclusive representations of LBGTQ+ issues. They launched several successful ad campaigns casting gay people in a better light and convinced industry giants to change editorial policy to use more appropriate and respectful terms in their media coverage. GLAAD was becoming a media watchdog that fought defamation while simultaneously advocating for visibility. From the late 1990s through the 2000s, shows like Ellen, Will & Grace, and Modern Family— accompanied by other popular programs that prominently featured dynamic gay characters— helped normalize same-sex couples in the mind of the average American viewer who otherwise didn’t know any “out” LGBTQ+ people. Human beings are typically compelled by good storytelling and are more likely to show compassion towards gay issues if they feel a bond with a gay person, or even a gay character. A 2017 study at Pepperdine University “Changing Media and Changing Minds: Media Exposure and Viewer Attitudes Towards Homosexuality” found that, “people with more exposure to media with more positive representations of homosexual people and the issue of homosexuality will have higher acceptability for the issue and willingness to learn more about the issue.”
In today’s world, with wireless internet and countless media sources, the LGBTQ+ community is more positively viewed by the public than ever before, and yet transgendered people, particularly black trans women, are murdered at disproportionately higher rates. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reports, “Sadly, 2020 has already seen at least 44 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means, the majority of which were Black and Latinx transgender women. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported -- or misreported.” Alongside increased violence against trans people, HRC published an article on anti-LGBTQ bills currently sweeping through local and state legislature entitled, “2021 Officially Becomes Worst Year in Recent History for LGBTQ State Legislative Attacks as Unprecedented Number of States Enact Record-Shattering Number of Anti-LGBTQ Measures Into Law.” Most of the proposed bills target trans youth, aiming to restrict their ability to participate in sports or receive gender-affirming health care. In April of 2021, Arkansas passed HB1570, making it illegal for healthcare practitioners to provide puberty blockers or hormone therapy for transgender minors, prohibiting them from transitioning. According to The Advocate, the new law has sparked a rash of suicide attempts among trans youth, an at-risk group that already has statistically higher rates of suicide. How the media represents transgender people matters now more than ever before, but when it comes to accurate or positive trans visibility in the mainstream, the media still has work to do.
Cast of Pose clockwise from top: Angelica Ross, MJ Rodriguez, Hailie Sahar, Dominique Jackson, Indya Moore Photo credit: Bethany Wade
GLAAD published findings from a recent Pew Poll estimating, “nearly 90% of Americans say they personally know someone who is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. However, multiple polls show that approximately 20% of Americans say they personally know someone who is transgender. Given this reality, most Americans learn about transgender people through the media.” The problem lies in the continued use of defamatory stereotypes for trans characters, if they are present at all, and the casting of cisgendered actors to play trans roles. In Disclosure, a documentary about trans representation in the media available on Netflix, the various transgender tropes are broken down to reveal not only the harmful effects they have on public perception of the transgender community, but also the negative impact they have on trans people’s perceptions of themselves. More often than not, trans people are still cast as either victims or villains who are disposable one-dimensional characters, and their gender is often used as a plot twist or the butt of a joke. Even an exceptional performance of a cisgender actor playing a trans role sends the wrong message to audiences, a message that in some way trans people are just pretending. There is a dire need for stories inclusive of the trans perspective without trans identity at the center, stories that show trans characters thriving and not at odds with themselves or society. If most Americans derive their understanding of transgender people through the media, the media must give them trans characters they can identify with— and root for. In recent years, breakthrough shows like Transparent, which featured many trans actors, and Pose, the first show to star mostly trans women of color, proved there is an appetite for more nuanced and positive portrayals of trans life. A more fair and accurate representation of transgender people is not only more entertaining, but it also endears the audience to trans characters and informs them of trans issues.
The entertainment and news media play an important role in shaping society’s viewpoint on the LGBTQ+ community, but in truth, it is up to all of us to analyze the content we consume and do our part to unlearn our socialized prejudices. Even as anti-LGBTQ bills pass through state legislatures, the public outcry against such discrimination offers hope to trans youth currently living in states like Arkansas that people do care about them. Their lives, and the telling of their stories, can help stir compassion in and win hearts. They can help change minds.
Hollywood - Where Dreams Come True?
Review of North Hollywood, directed by Mikey Alfred. A look into his debut film.
Written by Andrea Tangelo
Photo Credit: Kirk McKoy/ Los Angeles Times
When you think about Hollywood, what probably comes to mind is the glitz and glam of your favorite celebrities and the place where all the big-budget movies are made. But just like every other city that is known for a trademark phenomenon, the “native” locals have a different experience and bring other cultures that take part in that city.
Director Mikey Alfred shows us another side of Hollywood in his debut film North Hollywood, giving us a look into skate culture as we follow Michael’s character in his journey to becoming a pro skater. The film largely reflects Alfred’s life; as he grew up in North Hollywood, he aesthetically shows you his hometown through his eyes, birthing his auteurist style.
Before his debut feature, Alfred had created a few short films that heavily influenced the cinematography in North Hollywood. After utilizing a primarily indie LA -hip hop tracklist throughout the film, Alfred switches it up a bit by adding the 1950s rock and jazz sounds to set the tone for scenes, including the works of Arthur Lee Maye and The Crown, Shirley Horn, Bill Haley & His Comets and more musicians from that era. From local skateparks to the hangout spots where he and his skate group, Illegal Civilization, could be found, the backdrop for many of the locations in the film were locations that Alfred would frequent while growing up in North Hollywood. In fact, many of Alfred’s fellow skaters also played several lead roles in the film, enhancing the interplay between his own life and the film's fiction.
Photo Credit: Everett Collection
While the cinematography is amazing, the plot of the film tends to fall short. It becomes less about Michael’s professional skating and more about becoming an adult, making it more of a coming-of-age film than anything else. Pursuing a pro-skating career is where Michael learns the small lessons about being an adult as he is trying to make that first big step out of high school.We never really get to see him skate in the film, leaving the audience to question what the point is of the turmoil he was causing in his life; we as viewers don’t even know if he can genuinely skate.
Its linear structure forces us to focus on one theme and one person. The moment you get some type of character development, the film closes its doors. Michael projects his fear onto his friends and family by believing that they are not supporting his dreams. He pushes them away when he constantly gets caught lying to them about his whereabouts when hanging with a more well-known skate crew. The continuous cycle is played throughout the entire movie and ends when he has honest conversations, later finding out that they only want what is best and support him. These moments occur in the last ten minutes, ending with a scene of him skating off into the sunset, reciting a poem about the journey ahead being a lonely one. The audience never gets to see beyond this new learned experience, left wondering if Michael ever goes pro, but left with reassurance that he will always have the support of his loved ones.
Director: Mikey Alfred
Running Time: 93 Minutes
Available on select streaming services
Andrea is a Production Coordinator based in Brooklyn, NY whose true passion lies far away from the set and more on what is given on screen.
On Film Editing and the Math Proof
Film editing is a characteristic of filmmaking separating it from other artistic mediums and the math proof similarly characterizes mathematics in regards to other sciences. Analyzing the relationship of these characteristics to their fields, similarities arise between them that could be used to enrich both fields.
Written by Tashrika Sharma
Filmmaking and science have a long documented history, going as far back as early amateur filmmaker like Eadweard Muybridge who invented devices in the late 19th century to record movement. However, filmmaking and theoretical mathematics have little conversational history. One method of creating a conversation between the two fields could be by connecting them through their unique characteristics. While editing exists in all artistic mediums, editing in film is a technique that distinguishes film from other art forms. Whereas in mathematics, the math proof remains a mysterious combination of prose and symbols used to verify abstract statements unlike the hard sciences. These distinguishing characteristics of film and math reveal their ephemeral natures and thus provide one basis in which they can be related to each other.
“It may sound almost circular to say that what mathematicians are accomplishing is to advance human understanding of mathematics,” William Thurston wrote in On Proof and Progress In Mathematics, focusing on the psychological and sociological aspects of how math is practiced and not upon how to define it. The key aspect is that practicing mathematics involves advancing how human beings think and understand various aspects of the field. This can range from being part of a team that discovers a new result, or a team that rediscovers an old one. Thurston enumerates that aspects of math thinking involves: human language, visual, spatial, and kinesthetic sense, logic and deduction, intuition, association, and metaphor, as well as stimulus-response,and processing of time. Combinations of such thinking practices can lead to understandings that are harder to explain since they are often intangible, difficult to communicate, individual, and often the subtext of the conversation.
Photo credit: 8 1/2 (Dir. Federico Fellini, 1963), the audience is often between what the film director, Guido (center, played by Marcello Mastroianni), is fantasizing and experiencing as he embarks on making his film. He imagines Claudia Cardinale (left) gliding to give him a glass of water only to snap back into reality by the woman offering him the water (right).
The subtext is the unconscious aspect of communication that creates a more profound experience of the storytelling. “To me, the perfect film is as though it were unwinding behind your eyes, and your eyes were projecting it themselves so that you were seeing what you wished to see. Film is like thought. It’s the closest to the thought process of any art,” John Huston said in an interview published in Christian Science Monitor in 1973. The film 8 ½, which follows the creative process of the film director at the center of it, famously makes seamless transitions between the past, the present and the conditional future representing the thoughts of the director. While film is an immediate manifestation we experience, there are also internal understandings that arise in filmgoers. They arise from the thoughts guiding the films colliding with the personal associations each individual makes while watching.
Photo Credit: Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943), “the woman (Maya Deren) later on in the film watches herself from a window experiencing an incident that occurred earlier in the film.” via Flicker Alley
Mathematics distinguishes itself from other fields in that ideas are communicated through proofs. A proof in the most general sense is defined as a clear flow of convincing mathematical ideas. While proofs are read linearly, readers often engage and process them non-linearly. Non-linearity in storytelling is often associated with surrealism or dynamic storytelling, one can see non-linearity in many of the sequences of the experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon which unfolds in a dream-like form. Proofs are not primary information but are a way to organize mathematical understandings and are extremely useful. These proofs are what subsequent generations encounter in terms of past work. The language they’re written in inadequately captures the way each generation thinks about the same ideas and communicates them.
Photo Credit: Meshes of the Afternoon (Dir. Maya Deren, 1943), “knife sequence is immediately proceeded by a key in the same spot” via Flicker Alley
While every field of art involves editing, filmmaking separates itself through the function of “separation” (or referred to in other cultures as “assembly”) of footage. This editing process produces a rhythm defined as the unseen but strongly felt guiding force behind an audience’s experience of watching. For these reasons, filmmaking is described as “sculpting in time” by the director Andrei Tarkovsky in his book Sculpting in Time. The editing process in this sculpting works similarly to how we blink, as remarked by Walter Murch in In The Blink of An Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Murch wrote.
“the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway.”
The choices in visual discontinuity by the blink (the edit) create a path for the film to convey the language intrinsic to itself, quite like a dream, to an audience ready to be convinced. In mathematics, it’s hard to talk about anything without explaining it. The proof or the explanation is a way of making the invisible visible - of building a path to get everyone on the same page. The communal language of the mathematical proof presupposes that the reader is prepared to be convinced. In both fields, one is telling a story making an audience familiar with something that at first feels unfamiliar, but with inexplicable revelations in each part of the proof or film, one is also at the same time becoming unfamiliar with the familiar. The latter sensation occurs when we shift our experience in reaction to something, whether a mathematical object becomes deeper in our mental image of it or watching a film expands our understanding of ourselves or others. In both cases, the math proof and the film are both temporally dynamic and exist in ways that paintings, sculptures, and other biological, chemical or physical objects are not.
If the film edit works to make films feel like a waking dream, then math progress and the mysterious way proofs work are like that of a sleepwalker. In that sense, there could be a relationship between the waking dream and sleepwalking to create work that enriches math communication and filmgoing experiences.
Reel Works’ Outcalt Award Nominees Shine in Virtual Screening
The nominees of the 2021 F. John Outcalt Award for Outstanding Filmmaking were highlighted at a virtual screening produced by Reel Works, a non-profit production company uplifting young people’s cinematic visions. Here are reviews of the dramas and documentaries directed by these incredible storytellers.
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
The nominees of the 2021 F. John Outcalt Award for Outstanding Filmmaking were highlighted at a virtual screening produced by Reel Works, a non-profit production company that empowers young storytellers through partnerships with filmmaking mentors and resources. Hosted by Bryan Clark, the night featured a combination of five different dramas and documentaries, followed by Q&A’s with each filmmaker. Reel Works’ efforts to uplift young people’s cinematic visions in New York City succeeded by leaps and bounds; by the end of the evening’s virtual screening, dozens of attendees had been moved to tears by these young visionaries. The nominees and their respective films are featured below.
Photo Credits: Shot from “MerryMakers” via Reel Works YouTube channel
“MerryMakers”
Directed by Elena Goluboff
Running Time: 10 minutes
Watch on YouTube
Goluboff’s techniques feel effortless and well-executed in a short film about two young girls growing apart while maintaining their independence. The film begins with 12:17 am flashing brightly on the screen as two thirteen-year-olds, Maya and Nora, contemplate their boredom inside a dimly lit bedroom. Maya, sensing Nora’s dissatisfaction with their night, proposes venturing out past curfew into the streets of New York, silently hoping to win back her friend whose emotional distance is palpable.
The use of a handheld camera closely follows their whimsical journey as Maya’s subdued narration ponders her friend’s growing distance. Eventually, the pair stumble into a man abusing his girlfriend; while their childlike whimsy dissipates, their empowerment does not. Maya throws a glass bottle at the man to disrupt the scene. Running away, Maya and Nora encounter more obstacles. They are arguing about whether to return inside when they see Maya’s dad awake in the house. Tension builds as Maya realizes that not all friendships are meant to last, and she once again asserts her strength by going against Nora’s demands, turning the key to unlock the door to her home.
“Under the Sun”
Directed by Jesus Luna
Running Time: 8 minutes
Watch on YouTube
Luna investigates the complexities and intersections of religion and science via his family members’ experiences with sleep paralysis. Juxtaposing shots of color and black and white, the eight-minute documentary showcases interviews of Luna’s aunt and uncle relaying their sleep paralysis histories. The dichotomy of religion and science arises in those diplomatic confrontations; his uncle, Gabriel, seeks to understand through his faith by taking up consistent prayer, while his aunt, Yvonne, attempts to remedy her episodes by managing her stress and maintaining a regular sleep schedule. Luna expertly includes Father Espinal, a Catholic priest, who unexpectedly bridges the divide between Luna’s family members. “There seems to be a false dichotomy that exists between science and faith,” the priest asserts, seeking consensus and understanding. Luna concludes the film with a similar tone, reinforcing his efforts to find not only underlying meaning but greater purpose and cohesion in the ordinary events of a life.
Photo Credits: Shot from “Under the Sun” via Reel Works YouTube channel
“Normal Family”
Directed by Maya Velazquez
Running Time: 9 minutes
Watch on YouTube
It was hard not to be incredibly touched by the love story of Velazquez’s mothers, Maritza and Jeannette. Velazquez’s documentary did not feel like her first; her artistic choices appeared like those of an experienced and powerful storyteller. The timing of her edits showed true mastery over material that was so deeply personal and profound.
“I love her. She’s my best friend… That’s what it’s all about. It’s about love.”
Moving between home videos of the past and glimpses of the present, Velazquez recounts her surprise after learning about the difficult battles each of her mothers underwent when coming out to their respective families. Their journey for authenticity and honesty is enhanced by the mise-en-scene of Maritza in the grocery store, of Jeannette running errands in the car, and of her brother, Marcus, playing Jenga. These small shots of the ordinary echo the wonderful life Velazquez continues to share with her family amidst injustice, intolerance, and pain.
“Who Is It?
Directed by Marcus Cochran
Running Time: 11 minutes
Watch on YouTube
Cochran’s drama is a nod to traditional film noir with a twist of the contemporary. Shot in black and white: Cochran directs a tense exchange between a father, Joseph, and a son, Michael. The son, diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, struggles to confront his selfish and manipulative father. Upon arrival, Joseph feigns celebration for his son’s birthday, only to mischievously grab at Michael’s wallet by the end of the evening. As the camera shifts from wide shots to close-ups, viewers watch Michael muster the strength to confront his abuser and subsequently his childhood trauma, tackling the horrors of his past while accepting who he is now.
Photo Credits: Shot from “What We Owe to Ourselves” via Reel Works YouTube channel
“What We Owe to Ourselves”
Directed by Khiari Jaffier
Running Time: 10 minutes
Watch on YouTube
Jaffier professionally excavates the conflict between the capitalist dollar and self-actualization in his documentary, “What We Owe to Ourselves.” Jaffier’s expert narration plays over shots of paintings, high school hallways, and assorted creative spaces as he contemplates how young people’s artistic ambitions can be squashed by incentives to dive into “safer” career choices.
“Life hasn’t gotten easier, it’s just gotten noisier.”
Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie 1” ripples over interviews with aspiring students, like Paolo whose passion for the piano is evident in his earnestness. In a conversation regarding the essence of creativity, Paolo mentions that “it’s all kind of cheesy stuff, but I like the cheesy stuff.” It’s these small idiosyncratic moments captured on film that makes Jaffier’s inquiry into becoming such a pleasure.
All of these young filmmakers showcased true mastery over cinematic techniques in their own unique ways. Jesus Luna was announced the winner of the Outcalt award at Reel Works’ virtual 20th Anniversary Gala on May 26th with his film “Under the Sun.” You can donate to Reel Works’ efforts here.
Arts and Education: 16k and Margo & Perry
Symone Baptiste, director of “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” and Becca Roth, director of “Margo & Perry” go in depth on using episodic form and comedy as tools for truth and change.
Written by Lex Young
“Sixteen Thousand Dollars” directed by Symone Baptiste and “Margo & Perry” directed by Becca Roth each use different tools of artistry and storytelling to highlight the importance of the medium of film as a method for education and awareness, not just entertainment. Their growth as projects are a testament to their success and the importance of their work and messages.
Photo credit via “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” Trailer
Baptiste is a stand-up show producer and booker in LA who was a showrunner for season one of “Call & Response” and has interviewed and directed talent for NBC. “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” is an episodic short film that won Best Narrative Short at the 2020 Bushwick Film Fest. The short explores ideas of reparations through a struggling college grad who tries to figure out how to spend his reparation check received in the mail. A writer and director whose personal mission is to foster diversity in the comedy space, Baptiste challenges viewers to see slavery reparations in a brand new light.
“It was absolutely principal that we added nuance to the debate on reparations, bringing the tough conversations around the subject to the forefront and facing them head-on.” In “Sixteen Thousand Dollars''
Photo credit via “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” Trailer
She uses comedy to explore these nuances. “It became extremely apparent that addressing the matter through comedy was the right move; it lowered the barriers to understanding the complex subject and gave it an edge.” The film has been shown not just in festivals but to college students, believing that the short form, as well as the comedic approach, are valuable for education and entertainment. “It’s a testament to the validity and truth behind the story of Sixteen Thousand Dollars”. The short has also been shown at Slamdance in it’s episodic category. After making “Sixteen Thousand Dollars”, Baptiste was approached several times about turning it into an episodic show. She praises the writing of Brodie Reed and Ellington Wells, who also star in the short. “The sibling dynamic they created on the page is impeccable. People want to see more of that, and I don’t disagree.”
Photo Credit: Director Becca Roth
Becca Roth is a narrative and documentary filmmaker who tells stories that explore themes of queerness and identity. Roth describes filmmaking as an important personal tool for self-expression, and her main character, Margo, uses her artmaking similarly. “For me, filmmaking has always been very, very personal. I wrote my first film when I was a teenager as a way to cope with my feelings for a female classmate that I couldn’t talk to anyone about.” Margo is an artist who interprets her world and identity through drawings and cartoons. “Through her relationship with Perry and her growth journey as an individual, her art becomes less self-deprecating and more expansive, imaginative, and inclusive.”
“Margo & Perry,” a proof-of-concept short, is the story of a young woman who babysits for a girl she believes to be the baby she gave up for adoption as a teen. Roth has written and directed multiple projects, including the 2017 short “Lens'' featured in the 2017 run of Bushwick Film Festival. The feature screenplay of “Margo & Perry” is one of ten screenplays selected by the Black List and GLAAD for the GLAAD list.
Photo credit via “Margo & Perry” Trailer
The short “Margo & Perry” was created from the award-winning feature screenplay. “I had to take the more complete story of the feature and distill part of it into a shorter piece that still demonstrates the characters and themes of the feature while being able to exist on its own as a standalone film.” She explains the importance of Margo's identity in both the short and feature. “Margo is also a queer protagonist, which is featured more overly in the feature version of this story, but I made sure to make it subtly clear in the short as well, and that is done through her art.”
Both films utilize different techniques of artistry and storytelling to explore themes of identity and reparations, and their growth and success prove the importance of film as a method of education and expression. Baptiste and her team are moving forward with pitching “Sixteen Thousand Dollars” as a series. “We’ve put so much hard work into developing a post-reparations world for nearly a year, so it’s been a long time coming.” The feature narrative film of “Margo & Perry” is currently in development and will be Roth’s debut feature film.
2020
Director: Symone Baptiste
Starring: Brodie Reed, Ellington Wells, and David Gborie
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2020
Director: Becca Roth
Starring: Sofia Black D’Elia, Annie Parisse and Charlotte Macleod
Lex Young is currently watching movies, writing and making things in New York. Catch more of their work on Instagram
Magaluf Ghost Town: Dropping the Curtain on Low-Cost Tourism
Magaluf Ghost Town, from Director Miguel Ángel Blanca, explores the inner workings of an island town with a reputation as a wild party destination for foreign tourists. Blanca points his camera at the locals who live in Magaluf year-round, and defies the rules of documentary by blending fact and fiction.
Written by Marisa Bianco
Photo Credit Catalan Films
On the island of Mallorca, the Spanish beach town Magaluf has an extravagant reputation in both Spain and the UK. As an American living in Spain, I had never heard of it, but my British friends immediately recognized Magaluf. They could speak to its infamy as a cheap, revelrous destination for young Brits. Magaluf has been the subject of British reality shows such as “Geordie Shore” (a variation on Jersey Shore) and sensationalized news stories that have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in the town. The TV cameras flock there because of its reputation for wild and uninhibited tourism. In turn, the airing of the news stories and reality shows further increases its notoriety, attracting more foreigners who are inclined to public debauchery.
Director Miguel Ángel Blanca subverts this expectation for derangement. Instead, he points the camera toward the Magaluf locals in his new documentary Magaluf Ghost Town, which premiered at the 2021 Hot Docs Festival. Blanca casts an array of Magaluf locals from different places and generations who he films reenacting events in their lives as well as their dreams and fantasies. These characters are shown inside their homes, close-up and intimately. We never see tourists like this. Instead, we see them as the locals see them—from afar, in the background, seemingly from another planet. In this way, the film invites us to question our perspective. Why are we drawn to, at least in part, the sensationalization of the revelry and fornication? The news stories and reality TV specials wouldn’t exist without a willing audience who wants to see these tourists’ uninhibited escapades. The film confronts us with this. We want the camera to zoom in, to look closer at the tourists. Instead, they are lurking around the characters. When the camera finally points to them, the score changes to something resembling a horror soundtrack.
The film’s narrative is both circular and linear. The first thing we hear is children whisper-singing a song, in English, about Magaluf. The lyrics are bright and optimistic (“The sun is always high down here in Magaluf”), but the whispers are thoroughly chilling. While the song plays, we see the manufacturing of an aerial model of Magaluf that becomes a motif throughout the film. The camera keeps returning to the model’s tiny hotels and golf courses between scenes. After the model is built, the film opens to the real Magaluf, empty before the high season, with scenes of a quiet beach accompanied by a lullaby-like score. As the tourists arrive, the lullaby shifts to the horror music.
The film ends when the tourists leave. It’s a complete circle—the hotels are quiet once again, and the lullaby soundtrack returns. When the visuals fade to black, we again hear the whisper-singing children. As the credits roll, the children’s voices disappear into the 1987 cult hit “Come to Magalluf” by Brios. The seamless transition from a silent accompaniment to 1980s disco-pop is eerie, as we realize the children were singing the pop song all along.
Photo Credit Catalan Films
The main characters are Tere, an older woman mourning her late husband who, out of economic necessity, takes in a Malian flatmate, Cheickne, and Rubén, a young gay student who aspires to be an actor, but feels trapped by Magaluf. Blanca introduces the characters with immediate life and death stakes. Tere is trying to quit smoking after a month-long stay in the hospital; she says that she must choose between smoking and her life. Rubén is doing a photoshoot with friends in a creepy shed where a man was allegedly burned alive. They take photos of each other playing dead, laughing with a disturbing levity.
With these characters, we see that Magaluf isn’t just a “ghost town” when the tourists are gone. Magaluf and its residents have an unmistakable supernatural sensibility. Tere tells Cheikne about her nightmares. She says, “I can feel it in my bones, something is going to happen here...What is it? I don’t know. But there’s something.” Meanwhile, Rubén says that people in Magaluf are “excited that something incredible could happen.” This idea of premonition is felt differently among the two generations, but the expectancy is there nonetheless.
The film’s climax revolves around a culmination of the supernatural within the characters. Rubén and his boyfriend kidnap a British tourist and take him to an uninhabited island just off the coast of Magaluf, where they take his clothes and abandon him. This abduction is interrupted by a scene of Tere seeing a medium, who tells her that her late husband has not yet crossed from our world. Another character, Russian real estate agent Olga, talks to her daughter about how she can feel the presence of people who have died. She says “don’t be afraid” that someone is with us, but unnerving music plays in the background. Despite her assurance, I am very much afraid.
Just as the characters explore the boundary between our world and the world of fantasmas (ghosts and spirits), the film explores the boundary between fiction and reality. The kidnapping scene is made to look real, as Blanca intersperses his footage with clips of the boys’ Instagram or Snapchat stories with messages like “Buscando víctimas.” I almost wondered whether I was watching an actual abduction. This confusion is intentional—everything we see is meant to be uncertain. With Blanca’s camera, nightmares and fantasies are made real.
Photo Credit Catalan Films
There is a constant sense throughout the film that Magaluf is a paradox. Rubén feels trapped; he expresses that their destiny is to go to school to learn to serve “guiris” (pale-skinned foreigners) and make guiris happy. At the same time, he feels that anything can happen in Magaluf, even something “magical.” Furthermore, the film portrays tourists like foreign invaders, wreaking havoc on the locals’ lives with their drunken exploits. But without the tourists, Magaluf wouldn’t have an economy. The locals wouldn’t be able to live. Is the solution then with Olga, the real estate agent who wants to clean up the town’s party strip and attract wealthier Europeans over the young vacationers? The mansion she shows contrasts so strikingly to Tere and Rubén’s cramped quarters. Her vision doesn’t necessarily seem like a more attractive option.
I watched Magaluf Ghost Town twice, before and after a weekend on the beach. I was in Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol, another popular Mediterranean destination among British tourists and retirees. Fuengirola is the type of town built for holiday-makers, full of hotels and apartment rentals with balconies and terraces looking towards the sea or the mountains. It lacks the Spanish character found in other towns in the region. Watching the film’s dichotomy between the “guiris” and the locals was strange because I felt like I didn’t belong in either box. Despite being considered a “guiri” for speaking English, I am not necessarily a tourist. Am I blending into the town’s fabric of locals, or am I a tourist invader? I don’t know the answer, but I know that Blanca’s perspective has made me look at myself and this country I call my second home in a new way.
Magaluf Ghost Town is the type of documentary that is not only beautifully shot but also defies the rules of documentary filmmaking, making it even more memorable and emotionally stirring.
Title: Magaluf Ghost Down
Director: Miguel Ángel Blanca
Running Time: 93 minutes
Year: 2021
2021 Hot Docs Festival: Celebration of LGBTQ+ Cinema
The 2021 Hot Docs Festival (April 29th through May 9th) recently hosted a Celebration of LGBTQ+ Cinema, an online social event honoring the filmmakers whose work was featured at this year’s festival. Here are a few of the poignant documentaries Aubrey Benmark had the opportunity to view.
Written by Aubrey Benmark
Photo Credit: Fae Pictures
“International Dawn Chorus Day”
Director: John Greyson
Running Time: 16 minutes
Country: Canada
Year: 2021
Taking place on the first Sunday of May, International Dawn Chorus Day is a worldwide celebration inspiring people across the globe to rise with the sun and enjoy birdsong. The film cleverly adapts the event into a Zoom meeting full of birds cooing and cawing, dividing the screen into several video feeds depicting various landscapes from around the world. In contrast to the auspicious occasion, the birds speculate over the recent death of Egyptian activist/filmmaker Shady Habash, who died in a Cairo prison after years of detention as a political prisoner. In 2018, Habash produced the music video Balaha with artist Ramy Essam, criticizing Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, the president of Egypt. The birds also lament over the death of Sarah Hegazi, a woman who was arrested in 2017 for flying a rainbow flag at an Egyptian concert, then was beaten and tortured for three months. Hegazi moved to Toronto in 2018 as a political refugee, but was unable to recover from her trauma and committed suicide a month after Shady Habash’s death. The gallery view of the birds’ Zoom call is interspersed with images of Sarah Hegazi, Shady Habash, and several other political prisoners facing injustice at the hands of Al-Sisi’s regime.
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Marlene Dietrich in 1975 Source: AP Photo
“Mad About Marlene” (Rough Cut)
Director: Vera Iwerebor
Running Time: 59 minutes
Country: Netherlands
Year: 2021
The film delves into the personal life and career of world-renowned star Marlene Dietrich, as seen through the eyes of six of her greatest fans— all older gay gentlemen. From 1959 to 1975, Dietrich toured the world with her one-woman show and left an indelible mark on a generation. Through interviews, the men discuss their love for the icon and share their extensive collections of photos, records, films, magazines, and article cut-outs, among many other Dietrich memorabilia, that have enhanced their lives throughout the years. One fan produces and performs in drag shows inspired by Dietrich, striving for perfection in every aspect, constantly asking himself, “How would Marlene do this?” Another fan makes life-like dolls of Dietrich and has travelled the world exhibiting his work. Two of the men visit Deutsche Kinemathek, a prominent German film archive that purchased Marlene’s collection of costumes, keepsakes, and other personal effects, including letters from family and lovers, after her death in 1993. As a gay icon, Marlene Dietrich enriched the lives of these men, offering them a source of strength while grappling with their own identities.
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Photo Credit: Prospektor
“Girlsboysmix”
Directors: Lara Aerts & Els van Driel
Running Time: 7 minutes
Country: Netherlands
Year: 2020
The film follows nine-year-old Wen Long, a child born intersex (formerly referred to as hermaphroditism, the presence of both male and female reproductive tissue in a person). She was adopted as a toddler and moved to the Netherlands after being left on a roadside in China. Pictures reveal the younger Wen dressed and styled as a little boy, although she currently has long hair and wears more feminine clothing. Rather than force Wen to receive a ‘corrective’ surgery she might later regret, her adopted parents provide much-needed support to their child’s identity, believing she should be the one to make decisions about her body when she is much older. Wen talks about the boys who bully her in school. One of them told her, “You’re not a boy, you’re not a girl, so you’re nothing at all,” but the precocious Wen has a different attitude.
“Intersex people decide if they are a boy or a girl. They don’t have to but they can,” she said.
Wen goes on a field trip to a sheep farm with a few of her friends. The children playfully make guesses over which sheep are rams (boys) or ewes (girls) until the sheepherder introduces them to a freemartin, an intersex sheep. Wen wishes “that everyone would know what intersex is so she doesn’t have to explain it.” Like any child, Wen only wants to be herself. The film is a cheerful portrait of a young person innocently confronting the inadequacies of the gender binary.
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Photo credit: National Film Board of Canada
“Into Light”
Director: Sheona McDonald
Running Time: 20 minutes
Country: Canada
Year: 2021
Set in Yellowknife, Canada, the film revolves around a mother’s journey to accept her child’s gender transition. To protect their privacy, the faces and identities of the pair aren’t revealed, a real and honest concern having already faced discrimination in their small community. During the beginning of her interview, when asked to talk about her child in the past tense as a boy, the mother struggles, not wanting to go against her child’s wishes. The transition began during pre-school when the mother took her son shopping to buy an outfit for the Christmas pageant. He eagerly picked out a sparkly silver dress and immediately put it on when they returned home. It was the first time the mother saw confidence in her child. As her son, he was always grumpy and scared; he often hid behind her legs and refused to interact with others. As the months went on, her son told her, “You know I’m really a girl,” and asked for different pronouns. As her daughter, with longer hair and prettier clothes, the child became social and excited to participate in life despite the bullying she faced at school. At age 5, she received a new birth certificate and health card with the correct gender markers. People they knew started to avoid them. The mother feared the hateful things others would say or do, but realized it was easier for the child to be ridiculed than to live in a way that was inauthentic. McDonald shot the film amidst a snowy backdrop, with scenes of the two playing in a massive snow castle juxtaposed with wide shots of the austere winter landscape, illustrating the bond between mother and daughter in a world where transgender children are far from being accepted.
