Activate a membership during our year-end giving campaign and receive a punch card worth three concessions at the AFS Cinema. Renew or sign up at the LOVE level or above and receive a coupon for an AFS-branded t-shirt.
Written by Diane Killough, AFS Creative Careers Intern
Across Hong Sang-Soo’s body of work, tables serve as a focal point for interactions between his characters. For the average Hong Sang-soo protagonist, life is typically complicated, frequently made messier by their own actions. Days are often filled with fumbled social encounters and misunderstandings, and an underlying ennui is always subtly present. Only at the table are we able to see these people break free from the chaos of everyday life and recenter themselves.
Often, Hong Sang-soo’s protagonists use their time at the table to voice their true thoughts and doubts about their lives to others, unrestrained by the forced niceties of the outside world. To Hong Sang-soo, the table represents a place to be vulnerable with the people around you, and he uses this to emphasize the importance of social bonds, outside of just the romantic or sexual.
In THE DAY HE ARRIVES (screening July 23 and 28), this is particularly central to the narrative. The film’s protagonist, Seong-jun, is shown to be caught in a cycle, constantly meeting friends and acquaintances at various bars or cafés, only truly connecting with others while sharing a drink or a meal. The interactions Seong-jun has away from the table are usually forced and overly polite, but sharing a meal with others acts as a mechanism where he can drop all pretense and truly connect with those around him. These scenes tend to be reflective and wordy, and they are the only times Seong-jun seems to be able to honestly assess himself and his life.
Likewise, in NIGHT AND DAY, the film’s protagonist, Kim Sung-nam, only seems to have honest, uncomfortable conversations over food. Kim is a mess and a very poor communicator. Hong Sang-soo uses the table to break down his characters’ social walls and push them into hard conversations they had been otherwise avoiding.
Contrary to the communal power of the table, traditional intimacy (i.e. physical and emotional) is shown more often to isolate and complicate these protagonist’s lives and typically weighs heavy on their psyches. This irony is present across Hong Sang-soo’s work and functions as a commentary on what “real intimacy” looks like to people who struggle to make meaningful connections. Time and time again, physical intimacy and its aftermath are seen to drive a wedge between people, whereas the communal power of the table allows people to easily connect and share their experiences.
Ultimately, Hong Sang-soo uses the act of communing at the table as an opportunity to put his characters under examination before our eyes, masterfully navigating the intricacies of social interaction and day-to-day life and putting those dynamics under the spotlight.
SXSW is a magical time of the year where, for a few weeks in March, the world turns its eyes on Austin, and the entire city transforms to exhibit the freshest work across creative disciplines and host countless artists, industry titans, fans, and supporters. For us, it’s all about the films and the Texas filmmakers who get the spotlight during the festival.
With so much going on, it can be hard to keep track of all the exciting events going on, but if you’re reading this, you’re a part of the Austin Film Society, which also means you’re now the recipient of our handy guide for all events in the AFS universe taking place at this year’s festival. Read on, help us support the talented members of the film community, and we hope to see you out and about during SXSW 2024!
AFS Filmmaker Events
THE IN BETWEEN, directed by Robie Flores
The AFS community includes filmmakers from throughout Texas: those who’ve received support from the AFS Grant and members of the AFS Board of Directors. Many of these artists are exhibiting their in this year’s festival, so be sure to check out their screenings at various venues across town. (Click through film titles to see the showtimes for each film.)
AN ARMY OF WOMEN Produced by Jessica Wolfson (AFS Grant Supported Filmmaker), and directed by Julie Lunde Lillesæter (Austin Public Producer)
CLEMENTE Produced by Mike Blizzard (AFS Board Member), executive produced by Richard Linklater (AFS Artistic Director)
SWITCH UP Produced by Elizabeth Avellán (AFS Advisory Board Member)
AFS Panels
In addition to film screenings, AFS also gets to participate in panels and meetups with other members of the industry at large. Come and listen to members AFS’s leadership discuss a range of topics pertaining to the present and future of the Texas film industry.
Having access to creative workforce data is essential to the success of the creative industry. That’s why AFS Director of Community Education Rakeda Ervin and a panel of regional experts will discuss their insights at SXSW EDU. Educators, employers, and filmmakers are all invited to join this discussion about who is reflected in the data and the role we play in strengthening the industry’s ecosystem.
Join the filmmaking team for a deep dive into the seven year journey to bring SING SING to life from script to screen and what it takes to truly make films as a community. SING SING is screening as part of the SXSW Film & TV Festival. SXSW Film & TV badge holders are welcome.
The Shine Co. Presents Texas Studios’ Tapestry Panelist Martin Jones (AFS Head of Austin Studios) March 11 | 10:00 AM | Arterie House
AFS’s Head of Austin Studios Martin Jones joins panelists Heather Page and Mindy Raymond from The Shine Company at Arterie House to discuss stages, sustainability, and savings while giving a glimpse into the future of local film production. SXSW Film & TV badge holders are welcome; please email mindy@weareshineco.com to RSVP.
The AFS ShortCase is an annual program of short films made by AFS members at the MAKE level and above. The event will include a post-screening Q&A with the filmmakers featured in the program.
This screening is free and open to the public, but you must reserve your ticket in advance.
CAN I DANCE FOR A SANDWICH Filmmaker: Mike Woolf, Beef and Pie Productions Photographer Alan Pogue’s documentation of Austin’s cultural and political life over the last 50 years is unmatched. So of course he was there, in the rain, shutter clicking, catching a random moment as it became magic. ‘Dance for a Sandwich’ is one of ten short documentaries embedded in the 23rd Street Mural Project.
BABE MAGNET Filmmaker: Rachel Kichler Upon news of their cancelled flight, four strangers band together to rent a car from Corpus Christi to Houston.
TINY, TEXAS Filmmaker: David Lykes Keenan In 1980s Texas, a star player and his coach face off on the basketball court and, figuratively speaking, hard truths are revealed as the onion of their relationship is peeled back.
BLACK MAGIC Filmmaker: Cristin Stephens Black Magic is about a diversity hire who contends with the expectations of her boss at the cost of her identity.
REVERIE Filmmaker: Kelli Horan In a future where time travel is used as a form of therapy, Imogen grapples with the weight of her troubled past and is given the opportunity to revisit her younger self and confront the experiences that shaped her present self.
BOYZ NIGHT Filmmaker: Chris Lyke When their mutual friend flakes on game night, two acquaintances get to know each other better.
RACA Filmmaker: Drew Saplin Raca follows Nacho, a socially inept, katana-wielding weirdo in search of connection, as he treks across his small coastal town on the 4th of July on a quest to find ice for his “best friends” in time for the fireworks show.
GRILLED QUESO Filmmaker: Sergio Muñoz Esquer A night in the life of an immigrant couple working in a food truck in the busiest area in Austin.
THE HUNGRY STORYTELLER Filmmaker: Yuta Yamaguchi A three-year-old boy tells his first favorite story.
AN ARMY OF WOMEN, directed by Julie Lunde Lillesæter
For 2024, the SXSW Film & TV Festival will be releasing a limited number of public pre-sale tickets for select screenings at select venues, including AFS Cinema. All screenings are general admission. Seating is subject to capacity and will occur on a priority basis approximately 45 minutes before the screening starts, and attendees are advised to arrive as early as 60 minutes prior to each screening. For more information, be sure to check out our website.
Among the 19 films we’re screening this year are GASOLINE RAINBOW(dir. the Ross brothers, BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS); SING SING(dir. Greg Kwedar, prod. Monique Walton and Clint Bentley, all AFS Grant-supported filmmakers); the Austin-made AN ARMY OF WOMEN(prod. AFS-supported Jessica Wolfson, dir. Austin Public Producer Julie Lunde Lillesæter); YASMEEN’S ELEMENT (dir. Amman Abbasi, DAYVEON); and SASQUATCH SUNSET(dir. the Zellner brothers, DAMSEL, KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER).
This is a great way to catch some of the amazing films playing at the festival without having to compete for downtown parking. Plus, we feel there’s something extremely satisfying about drinking a margarita while seeing a movie before almost everyone else in the world.
Written by Mia Shippey, AFS Creative Careers Intern
The 1980s marked a transformative period for cinema, and one name that continued to resonate with cinephiles everywhere was Jean-Luc Godard. The French New Wave pioneer, known for his groundbreaking work in the ’60s, ventured into the ’80s with a fervor that reflected the era’s spirit of change and experimentation. While these films may not have garnered as much public attention as his work from the ’60s, Godard proves that his voice is one worth listening to.
Godard’s ’80s films were characterized by a departure from the narrative structures of his earlier works. Embracing a fragmented, elliptical style, he continued to challenge conventional storytelling. Widely known as Godard’s, “second first film,” EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (1980) showcased his evolving visual language, blending bold aesthetics with a relentless exploration of existential themes, such as femininity and sexuality.
During a Dick Cavett interview in 1980, Godard told viewers that “Save Your Ass” was a more accurate translation of the film’s title. This film contains the air of self-awareness Godard was known for and a toxic leading man named after the director himself. Furthermore, the use of slow motion, shot at 24 frames per second and then slowed in editing, makes this film jagged and abrasive, highlighting the systematic abuse Godard is drawing our attention to. While this film ventures into the realm of distastefulness, it also manages to pick apart interpersonal relationships in an oddly authentic way.
A hallmark of Godard’s career has been his socio-political engagement, and the ’80s were no exception. In FIRST NAME: CARMEN (1983), he skillfully wove political commentary into this heist/thriller. Godard’s critiques of consumerism, media, and the shifting political landscape were evident, mirroring the societal upheavals of the time. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called the film, “both lucid and mysterious.” But this doesn’t make the film inaccessible to audiences.
Furthering Godard’s introspection, he appears in the film as Crazy Uncle Jeannot Godard who has given up filmmaking. This funny and inventive look at Godard himself gives the audience not only insight into the director but also room to laugh. The structure of the film leaves us with three different perspectives as artists and politicians try to bring their projects to life. The film is messy and people die, but it seems that Godard wants his audience to take comfort in that fact.
Perhaps one of Godard’s more notorious films, HAIL MARY (1985) is a controversial exploration of religious themes and contemporary society. The film reimagines the story of the Virgin Mary in a modern setting, showing the protagonist, a young woman named Marie, as a student and basketball player. The film challenges traditional religious narratives and explores the complexities of faith, sexuality, and existential questions.
This film sparked debates and discussions upon its release due to its unconventional approach to sacred subject matter. When Godard screened this film at Cannes, he was assaulted by a man who threw shaving cream in his face. While it’s maybe not the holiest film, this is a film that inspired audiences and got them talking. Godard responded to the incident at Cannes by saying, “This is what happens when silent movies meet talking pictures.”
DETECTIVE (1985) stands as a distinctive and unconventional entry in Godard’s career. Godard weaves together a complex tapestry of interconnected stories, blurring the lines between genres such as crime, drama, and comedy. The film follows a detective agency tasked with investigating the mysterious death of a wealthy businessman, but Godard’s narrative takes unexpected turns. The film is a dense and layered exploration of storytelling, identity, and the interplay between fiction and reality, inviting audiences to engage with its enigmatic narrative.
Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic odyssey in the ’80s was a testament to his unwavering commitment to artistic innovation. As he navigated the changing landscape of cinema, Godard continued to provoke thought, challenge norms, and redefine the boundaries of storytelling.
Written by Andy Corrales, AFS Creative Careers Intern
“An idea based in bloodlust could spread quickly in a civilization based on superstition.” — Detective Pete Thornton, BLOOD FEAST
This December, AFS Cinema is wrapping up its series Essential Cinema: The Original Indies with a pair of screenings of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s BLOOD FEAST on December 19 and 23; a film that Stephen King called the “worst horror movie” he’s ever seen that’s also in Time Magazine’s “Top Horror Movies of All Time.” While it might be unorthodox to include this divisive film in a line-up of films that birthed American Independent Cinema, its creation did signal a pivot in American cinema.
Herschell Gordon Lewis (1926-2016) was, if nothing else, a salesman. He had a PhD in English and a long career in advertising and marketing.
BLOOD FEAST clearly takes little interest in being confined to the binary labels of “good” or “bad” — its creation is simply a move of calculated marketing. While Lewis claims that the success of the film is “an accident of history,” remember that 1960s American cinema was experiencing the decline of Hays Code Hollywood. In 1960, the eyes of American audiences began to widen with violence and shock in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, an inspiration for Lewis. While PSYCHO birthed the slasher genre, Lewis took it to a previously unforeseen gory end and birthed the “splatter” or “gore” film.
Lewis made BLOOD FEAST for $24,000 and made millions in the box office by circumventing the major studio system. It has no big names and stars Connie Mason, a Playboy’s Playmate for June 1963, who gives a performance some say “makes acting look incredibly difficult.” It features nudity, women having their tongues pulled out, brains being chopped, limbs being eaten, and buckets of blood.The depravity, lewdness, and gore was everything American audiences had hidden from them by the major studio system in the 60s.
BLOOD FEAST lies at the intersection of schlocky filmmaking and clever marketing. Barf bags were distributed at the premiere, profits were returned exponentially, and Lewis went on to produce over 20 films in just a 10 year span. Lewis has a sense of humor that’s reflected in his over-the-top movies. He referred to American audiences as rats he’s guiding through a maze, and it’s abundantly clear Lewis understands exactly what general audiences want to see: blood and lust.
In an interview with Sean Baker in 2006, Lewis states: “I will tell you very flatly that my opinion is that the reason I’ve had good luck, both in the film business and the marketing business, is a total adherence to trying to figure out not what I want to say but what they want to see or hear. Couldn’t be simpler.”
The appeal of BLOOD FEAST couldn’t be simpler either. Lewis’ style of crude but energetic filmmaking and humor was a laugh in 1963, and it still works today.
You know the feeling you get when you give a gift to someone you really care about, one you’re sure is going to mean a lot to them? That’s how it feels announcing the filmmakers chosen in each cycle of the AFS Grant. And with summer drawing to a close, it’s time for us to hand you, our film community, your present: the list of filmmakers receiving the 2023 AFS Grant for Feature Films.
But before we get into who we awarded support to, we wanted to share something special about this announcement. This year, we were able to fund the highest amount of projects we ever have in a single grant cycle: 15 projects received a combined $110,000 in cash and in-kind support in the form of digital cinema packages (DCP) and camera rentals.
It’s a big deal for us because supporting Texas filmmakers — especially those who’ve been previously underrepresented in the industry — is coded directly into our DNA at AFS. This grant is not just for filmmakers in Austin but for artists throughout the Lone Star State, and the fact that we’re helping the careers of so many artists means the world to us.
Read on to get to know the recipients of this year’s features grant, and keep an eye on these projects as they continue on their development, production, and post-production journeys.
MEET THE RECIPIENTS OF THE 2023 AFS GRANT FOR FEATURE FILMS
Amy Bench is the director of the documentary WALKER, her first feature-length project (and recipient of the MPS Camera and Lighting Austin Grant). Bench has made many shorts before this, including MORE THAN I WANT TO REMEMBER, which won an NAACP Image Award, “Best Animated Short” at Tribeca, and was shortlisted for an Oscar® in 2023. WALKER explores the relationship between a deaf father, Walker, and his hearing daughter, Leslie, and was born out of Bench’s project BREAKING THE SILENCE, which was also supported by the AFS Grant. “I’m excited to get to know Walker and his family more deeply and to help share the life of an everyday hero.”
Benjamin Flaherty is a filmmaker from Austin, TX, and his film SHUFFLE was also awarded a Stuck On On DCP Award. He’s a filmmaker and a photographer with 15 years of experience making everything from documentaries and art films to commercials for major brands. His journey to sobriety in 2018 is the basis for SHUFFLE, which he hopes will have a long life on the festival circuit before he finds distribution. “While it’s a small movie, the subject matter is not. It’s an issue that affects millions of people.”
Cesar Aranda, director ofSLEEPING WITH YOUR EYES WIDE OPEN, is a recipient of the North Texas Pioneer Film Grant. While he is originally from Longview, TX, he is currently based in Denton and is a graduate of UNT. This is his first time receiving support from the AFS Grant, and when asked about his goals, he says “looking for the meaning of life through movies.” SLEEPING WITH YOUR EYES WIDE OPENis about the surrealist journey of a painter in the big city, and it’s full of peculiar characters worth getting to know.
Dana Reilly is a documentary filmmaker whose film OUR BODY ELECTRICfocuses on female bodybuilders in America and the challenges they contend with through the sport and in society at large. Reilly is based in San Antonio, TX, but before that, she lived in Austin. “I was actually introduced to strength training at Hyde Park Gym. Lifting weights completely transformed my relationship to food, my body, and my physical abilities, and my interest in women who found purpose through physical transformation and accomplishment grew from there.” OUR BODY ELECTRIC is a recipient of the Stuck On On DCP Award.
Edwin Oliva’s film 3RD PLACE explores the themes of small-town identities and Latinx representation. Oliva, himself, was born in the small town of Cuero, TX, and raised in nearby Yoakum, TX. “I have a special place in my heart for small Texas towns in the southeast region and decided to set my film in that area.” Oliva is now based in Austin and is a recent graduate of UT as well as a previous recipient of the Harrison McClure Endowed Film Fund Grant for undergraduate students, which is part of the AFS Grant for Short Films.
Hang Luong Nguyen’s narrative feature ROOFTOP LEMPICKA started out as a proof-of-concept short that was previously received AFS Grant funding as a short. Nguyen grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, which has helped foster interest in exploring the Vietnamese female identity, family relationships, and grief. “By making this film I hope to capture the essence of a time in Vietnam’s recent past and how, in that very specific moment in time, the lives of different Vietnamese women of different generations and backgrounds are interconnected.”
Jack Kyser is an Austin native, and his grant-supported film RUSTY LIGHTNIN’ dives into the world of a struggling actor turned ATF informant. Kyser spent 11 years in New York and said he has always felt a little out of place wherever he’s lived. “This reckoning with one’s identity is at the heart of RUSTY LIGHTNIN’, and it was what drove me to write the film in the first place. It’s about one’s relationship to their hometown and the performative nature of existing in two very different worlds.” He’s made seven short films that have screened at film festivals nationwide, and he is currently an editor for The Daily Show.
Lauren Paige Sanders’ documentary WHY AM I LIKE THIS? ADOPTION AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF is about a transracial adoptee exploring her origins and connecting with others like her. It’s a subject that is personal to Sanders. “After my adopted mother died, I watched a film called ROSE PLAYS JULIE. The basic plot was so eerily similar to my experience, that I began to wonder if my story could actually be worthy of telling.” Sanders is a graduate of UT’s RTF program and has 20 years of experience in editing, post-production, and composing.
Lauren Yap, Hannah Varnell, and Ivy Chiu are the directors of I NEED SPACE, which focuses on three queer performance artists in Austin as anti-LGBTQ legislation goes into effect across Texas. The co-directors bring a variety of media experience to their project, including commercials, music videos, and other documentaries, and their goals for this film show the importance of their documentary. With I NEED SPACE, Yap hopes to empower others looking for safety and belonging in the face of adversity, Varnell wants to contribute to national and international conversations across generations and communities, and Chiu wants their work to expand society’s collective knowledge of queer history.
PJ Raval received development funds for an UNTITLED PHILIPPINES PROJECT in 2022, a project that’s currently receiving post-production support in this cycle of the AFS Grant. While the details of this project are still under wraps, Raval’s previous feature documentary work includes TRINIDAD, BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, and CALL HER GANDA, the latter of which inspired several Philippines human rights organization chapters in Texas.
Robert Hope and Anna Japaridze are co-directors of THE TUSHURAI, a previously supported AFS Grant recipient that started out as a proof of concept in 2022. The documentary is about the people living in the Caucasus mountain region of Tusheti, Georgia, which is at the crossroads of Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Hope grew up in northern California, but his connection to the area began while traveling as a college student. Japaridze, on the other hand, grew up between Tbilisi and London. Hope says, “Through our work, we aim to raise awareness of the challenges faced by communities like Tusheti and hope to inspire conversations about the ways in which we can foster sustainable development and maintain a sense of collective belonging.”
Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda is the director of A SILENT WAVE, a narrative film about a housewife in post-Roe Texas and her unlikely friendship with an outspoken Muslim-American woman. The film is this year’s recipient of the New Texas Voices Award, which is given to a first-time filmmaker of color making a feature-length film. Mudigonda said, “My aspiration extends to bring A SILENT WAVE to theaters in the United States after its festival run.” Mudigonda and his spouse, Janani Vijayanathan, founded Kinostreet, an independent production house in Texas aimed at creating films about marginalized people and communities worldwide.
Seckeita Lewis is a Fort Worth-based filmmaker and another one of this year’s recipients of the North Texas Pioneer Award. Her film, ImPOSSIBLE, deals with its main character, Brandon, struggling with type 2 diabetes while pursuing his goal of becoming a police officer. In real life, the actor playing Brandon also struggles with type 2 diabetes, and Lewis says, “The goal of the story is not only to save Brandon’s life but the lives of millions of others through this inspirational film that features the protagonist fighting against the disease and winning.”
Shaun Michael Colón is from Dallas, TX, and is a recipient of the North Texas Pioneer Film Grant for his documentary AGE OF AUDIO. Colón is best known for his documentary A FAT WRECK, which chronicles the history of the punk-rock record label Fat Wreck Chords. His passion for audio and his support of art and culture are what have led him to create AGE OF AUDIO, a tale of modern audio storytelling.
Vanessa Uhlig is the director of DEFENDER, a documentary in development about the challenges of an Indigenous politician in Guatemala 20 years after the country’s civil war. Uhlig’s previous short film LAS CRUCES also explored Guatemalan politics and premiered at the Austin Film Festival. Of DEFENDER, Uhlig says “I see this story and its protagonist as a bridge not just in Guatemalan politics but in our conversations about the migration crisis, the legacy of U.S. economic involvement in Central America, and the way media can construct, constrain, or challenge ideologies of otherness.”
To read more about past AFS Grant recipients, click here. The next cycle of the AFS Grant is for feature-length films, and applications will re-open again in April 2024.
Written by Andrea Cardenas, Creative Careers Intern
The experimental road film, NO SEX LAST NIGHT (1996), co-directed by French artist Sophie Calle and American photographer Greg Shephard (and playing at AFS Cinema as part of our latest Essential Cinema series), is a quasi-fictional exploration of a woman and man traveling from New York to California, their trip and crumbling relationship documented through the use of video cameras and revelatory voice-overs. It is evocative and haunting — the intimate moments at times difficult to watch and other times hard to look away from. The final result is an 80-minute documentary-like work of art that feels like a voyeuristic peak at the most incompatible couple you’ve ever known. It borders on an invasion of privacy but one that is happily welcomed by the creators.
Calle, a world-renowned multidisciplinary artist, is known for toeing the thin lines between privacy and exposure, artifice and reality. In two of her most famous pieces, The Hotel (1981) and Address Book (1983), she obsessively documents people’s personal and private lives. She works as an ethnographer and intrusively observes minute details, in these cases messy and revealing hotel rooms and a stranger’s address book, respectively. (The photographs and accompanying text, often on display at museums, are now published as books.) In the film NO SEX LAST NIGHT, Calle turns the camera on herself and her partner in a bold manner. It’s hard to tell what is reality and what is a performance, but one thing is unquestionable: the film is buoyed by Calle’s very real grief over the death of her friend, fellow artist and writer Hervé Guibert.
NO SEX LAST NIGHT even opens with a solemn dedication to Guibert: “We dedicate this story to the writer Hervé Guibert who died of AIDS, in Paris, the afternoon of December 27, 1991, seven days before this trip began.” Guibert is given a symbolic burial by Calle in this opening sequence, who explains in a stirring voice-over how she has fled from Paris to avoid the pain of his imminent death, quietly honoring her friend at seaside and reminiscing over their friendship. She calls his answering machine to hear his voice and leaves one final message before embarking on her trip.
A year before Calle’s trip began, Guibert similarly picked up a portable camera and decided to record himself as well as the decline of his body while battling the aggressive disease. The result, the posthumously released MODESTY AND SHAME (1992), screening alongside NO SEX LAST NIGHT at AFS Cinema, is a video chronicle of his gut-wrenching final moments and a brutal artifact of one of the most devastating periods in recent history.
After being diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, Guibert wrote To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a graphic and candid account of the reality of living with the disease, which begins with a preface revealing his own HIV status to the world. The details are unsparing and written in an almost emotionally dissociated, straightforward manner. The novel, controversial for a number of reasons, jettisoned his fame and made him the face of the disease in France. It’s not that his extensive body of work had been completely ignored, but a collective morbid curiosity and fascination of a then-mysterious and stigmatized disease superseded any piece he could’ve ever created in his lifetime.
MODESTY AND SHAME is quietly brutal in the most affective of ways. Like with NO SEX LAST NIGHT, it is an unvarnished look at the most private moments of a person’s life but simultaneously a celebration of the artist that once was and will forever be. Today, many retrospectives on his life and work have opened at museums and institutions all over the world, and he is remembered less for his once-sordid identity as a gay man suffering from HIV and more for selflessly enlightening a woefully misinformed generation, his vital and significant contributions to the world of art and culture finally receiving the dignity they deserve.
Calle and Guibert are intrinsically tied by more than just their friendship: their genre-bending, experimental works are guided by a strong desire to reveal, whether it’s other people or themselves. But one thing is certain: these are their stories to tell.
Written by Joshua Bippert, AFS Creative Careers Intern
Naomi Kawase is searching — searching for answers to her own familial histories and to her own identity. The Japanese director searches in grainy personal film diaries or, at times, lyrical narrative features. As part of Austin Film Society’s latest Essential Cinema series, YOU’RE MY GREATEST TREASURE: 10 EXERCISES IN INTIMACY, AFS Cinema will be screening Naomi Kawase’s THE GRANDMOTHER TRILOGY (1994–1996). This trilogy is considered Kawase’s breakthrough and is comprised of 8mm film diaries in which Kawase examines her relationship with her adopted grandmother. The form of these films is one she established before the trilogy but continued to develop even into her later narrative features, and it’s a leading example of the autobiographical eye that Kawase would even extend to the personal, spiritual narrative films of her career. The influence THE GRANDMOTHER TRILOGY had on the rest of her filmography, a body of work that records Naomi Kawase’s own infatuation with interrogating herself and family, is fascinating and well worth exploring.
Naomi Kawase’s journey through her family history began with 1992’s EMBRACING, a short documentary, or film diary, about the process of finding the father she never knew while beginning to peer into her connection to her grandmother. Her relationship with her parents was largely nonexistent, and they split quickly after Kawase’s birth and left her to be adopted and raised by her great aunt (whom she has always referred to as her grandmother). EMBRACING serves as the first signifier of her perspective as a filmmaker: distinctly feminine, inquisitive, and entirely subjective. The film shows how she views the world, whether that’s by showing photographs of her childhood or playing audio of what her father’s voice sounds like over the phone after finally finding him.
Kawase’s relationship with her parents is further dissected in SKY, WIND, FIRE, WATER, EARTH (2001) where she processes the sudden death of her long-absent father. The film begins with her looking back on her previous film diaries, EMBRACING and THE GRANDMOTHER TRILOGY. The audience is invited to join her as she subjectively approaches the interpretation of her past and begins to understand the impact her upbringing had on her sense of self. In an effort to further define this, we are given access to conversations with her mother about motherhood and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. Later she visits a tattoo artist, initially contemplating getting an identical tattoo to her father’s, engaging in a lengthy conversation about her creativity, trauma, and even her own narcissism. Kawase, at her core, uses her films, regardless of genre, to answer her own questions about life. Would her career be where it is now without the separation of her parents? Can the death of a loved one shake one’s regard for mortality or even redefine the trajectory of an artist’s output? These self discoveries are significant to understanding Kawase’s cinema.
Naomi Kawase’s shift towards narrative features seems like an effort to play with her point of view more broadly. Kawase has always considered herself a filmmaker with a documentarian’s sensibilities. Her films are often high concept, ethereal, and poetic but grounded in a sense of real, lived experience. Three of her first four features are set in the Nara prefecture of Japan where Kawase herself resides. In her debut feature, SUZAKU (winner of the 1997 Caméra d’Or at Cannes), a real-life logging village in the midst of economic decline is the setting for a family grappling with their recently lost patriarch. The film establishes Kawase’s continued use of non-professional actors (employing much of the village’s residents) and themes that would continue to be showcased throughout her work: family and mortality, our connection to the natural world, womanhood, and budding sensuality.
Often in her work, Kawase’s camera feels voyeuristic. Persistently handheld, the camera follows or invades the spaces of her characters. In the opening of SHARA (2003), the camera meanders through a building and happens upon two young brothers playing together before following them (in an impressive long take) as they play tag through a labyrinthine neighborhood. It feels invasive until the scene serves to reveal the inexplicable disappearance of one of the brothers. The film then follows two teenagers as they approach adulthood: one boy, Shun, still working through the guilt and grief of losing his brother years prior as his mother (played by Naomi Kawase herself) is approaching the birth of another child; and a girl, Yu, questioning her own identity when she learns that her mother is actually her aunt (a clear self-referential plot). The film ends with Shun’s mother giving birth, shot in a way that make it feel like we’re intruding on the family in this private moment. Again, here, the camera lingers, revealing the wonder and community that new life can bring. The death of her father and the impending (and eventual) death of her grandmother influenced many of Naomi Kawase’s following films. TARACHIME (2006) saw her point the camera toward herself again as she documented her own pregnancy and childbirth while reckoning with her grandmother’s deteriorating health. THE MOURNING FOREST (winner of the 2007 Grand Prix at Cannes) sees a caretaker and elderly man, both grieving, lose themselves in a local forest, in a tale about the use of work as a distraction from processing one’s emotions. And again in STILL THE WATER (2014), the ephemeral nature of life is displayed as a teenage couple learns to let go of those who leave. It may seem obvious to some for an auteur to mine their own life for art, but Naomi Kawase embraces this technique — she breathes her experiences into broader characters for us to relate to, sure, but also for her own well being. Now that the subjects of her film diaries have largely passed, in more recent years, Naomi Kawase has transitioned to more commercial narrative films compared to her enigmatic early works. However, she continues to excavate her own life into this new period of her career. Although the film is fiction, in SWEET BEAN (2015) the elderly heroine — played by the late, always magnetic Kirin Kiki (SHOPLIFTERS) — is modeled after Kawase’s grandmother. The heroine of RADIANCE has both an absent father and a mother in a deteriorating condition. A trailblazing force for female directors in Japan, Naomi Kawase has used her family and own self reflections to create cinema since the start of her career, reminding us all the effects our persisting ruminations of the past can have on our present.
Written by Andrea Cardenas, AFS Creative Careers Intern
This summer, the Austin Film Society will be presenting THE LAST OF SHEILA with a special member mixer on June 30 before the film.
On a fateful night in 1968, musical theater titan Stephen Sondheim and actor Anthony Perkins organized one of their famous and beloved treasure hunts. The pair were known for their ardent love of puzzles (Sondheim frequently wrote crosswords for New York Magazine) and often arranged elaborate games for their celebrity and socialite friends. This particular game included limousine rides around Manhattan, tea and cake, Perkins’ mother, and bottles of champagne for the winning team. One of the attendees was Herbert Ross, an up-and-coming choreographer and occasional actor, who enjoyed the game so much he encouraged Sondheim and Perkins to write a screenplay about it. A seedling was planted, and years later, THE LAST OF SHEILA premiered in 1973. The final version of the script deviated from Sondheim and Perkins’ innocent treasure hunts and morphed into a deftly crafted meta-whodunit, all while poking fun at the frivolity and ridiculousness of Hollywood. The film resulted in the duo’s sole writing credit, Ross’ sophomore directorial feature, and would go on to star some of the biggest actors of the time, among them Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, and Raquel Welch.
The premise is straightforward enough for a standard murder mystery: on the one-year anniversary of a hit-and-run of the eponymous Sheila Green, a group of showbusiness friends — all present on the night of her death — are summoned by her Hollywood producer/widower for a vacation along the Mediterranean coast, lured under the guise of potentially making a movie based on Green’s life. Once aboard the yacht, they’re all invited to participate in the “Sheila Green Memorial Gossip Game;” cards with the sordid secrets of those onboard are distributed among the guests, and the goal, through a series of sly clues, is to match each card with its respective sinner. A murder comes soon after, along with a mysterious extra card, and the whodunit unravels in typical fashion. What sets the film apart, however, is its cleverly layered script, elevated by sharp performances and the added element of Hollywood satirization. Sondheim and Perkins imbue the film with their acerbic humor, unabashed queerness, campy indulgence, and insider knowledge of Tinseltown.
The duo pulled inspiration directly from their inner circle when writing the protagonists. The cast of characters consisted of movie producer Clinton Green (James Coburn), based on Sondheim; struggling screenwriter Tom (Richard Benjamin) and his wealthy wife, Lee (Joan Hackett), based on Perkins and his wife, heiress Berry Berenson; bombshell actress Alice (Raquel Welch), based on Welch (although she was told otherwise); her husband Anthony (Ian McShane); director Philip (James Mason), an Orson Welles-like figure; and most notably, brassy talent booker Christine (Dyan Cannon), a caricature of the infamous Sue Mengers.
Though most are only rumored to be based on their real-life counterparts, Cannon’s fictionalized Mengers, the raucously funny Christine — the film’s true stand-out — is played with a sharp wit and boldness that elevates the film from a fantastic mystery to a hilarious comedy. The larger-than-life Mengers was perhaps the biggest Hollywood agent of the time, with star clients from Barbra Streisand and Faye Dunaway to Ryan O’Neal and Candice Bergen. She was known for her brash and irreverent nature, earning her way to the top through her unorthodox work style and vibrant presence. The booker even had direct participation with the film, as she represented Cannon, Perkins, Ross, Coburn, and Benjamin.
Though not a financial success, the film was positively reviewed — Roger Ebert referred to it as a “devilishly complicated thriller of superior class” — and celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It has since garnered a cult following and had a major influence on the genre, most famously cited by Rian Johnson as an inspiration for his KNIVES OUT franchise of films, KNIVES OUT (2019) and GLASS ONION (2022), the latter of which featured a cameo from Sondheim in homage. Fans of the film will undoubtedly recognize shades of Cannon’s character in Kate Hudson’s GLASS ONION performance and be able to draw parallels between the complex, puzzle-like plots. And like Johnson, Sondheim and Perkins had plans to continue the series — or at least continue writing murder mysteries, collaborating on at least two more projects that were never realized. However, if the universal love for Johnson’s mystery franchise are any indication, we can expect to see the influence of THE LAST OF SHEILA for many years to come.
The delightfully eccentric and brazen THE LAST OF SHEILA screens June 30 & July 1 at AFS Cinema
Written by Joshua Bippert, AFS Creative Careers Intern
This month, as a part of AFS Cinema’s LATES series, Austin Film Society will be presenting Shinji Sômai’s sophomore feature, SAILOR SUIT AND MACHINE GUN. In a time when Japan’s studio systems were collapsing, directors like Sômai — as well as Nobuhiko Obayashi (HAUSU) — were creating independent films that subverted genres within the decaying studio confines. Sômai, in particular, made films that on paper seemed incredibly exuberant but in reality revealed a nuanced mix of melancholy and naturalism. The conventions and themes of his work have been incredibly influential to Japan’s current cinematic landscape for filmmakers such as Shunji Iwai (ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU) and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (DRIVE MY CAR). While he has explored diverse subject matter, much of Shinji Sômai’s films center around young people who blur the line between adulthood and adolescence.
Sômai’s interest in adolescence as subject matter seems, at times, sacred. His characters are brash and exuberant with their cartoonish personas there only to contrast the dark underbellies they traverse. P.P. RIDER (1983) involves three high school students on a befuddling quest to save their school bully, mistakenly kidnapped, from the local yakuza. The ferocity of youth sees the trio overcome shoot-outs and numerous long takes of escapes, including an unbroken five-minute chase across floating logs on a river. Sômai demands an intense physicality from his actors, possibly one reason for his interest in teenagers’ stories. The extreme portrayals of youth depict an effort to resist the nature of growing up, to not lose that freedom and irreverence.
At a cursory glance, the rambunctious youths in his oeuvre seem situated against the morose adults. But, often, these young characters are being pushed to overcome their juvenility. In SAILOR SUIT AND MACHINE GUN (1981), Izumi — a teenage school girl — comes into leadership of a small, makeshift yakuza clan. In MOVING, an elementary school girl must mature quickly due to the messy separation of her parents. Many of the parents of the young protagonists are absent and, when they are present, they are in the process of leaving or escaping. The adults of these stories are messy and complicated, showcasing their own childishness; a weary reminder that they too grew up too fast. It’s only through the kids’ own journeys and juxtaposition with their elders that Sômai reveals the necessity for youth to grow up because of the cyclical ineptitude of adults.
Perhaps most known for his formalism, Shinji Sômai’s use of long takes — like the famous 14-minute opening of LOST CHAPTER OF SNOW: PASSION (1985) or an unflinchingly extended fight in TYPHOON CLUB (1985) — while technically masterful, never feel staged. The prolonged sequences ground our experience of watching his characters. The aforementioned TYPHOON CLUB examines a group of teenagers trapped inside their school as a typhoon rages outside. A little into the night, one male student begins to chase and subsequently attack a female student. The scene may sound like a typical action sequence but, as is often the case with Sômai, description belies complexity: the scene lacks the typical markers of an action movie. Instead, we are brought to witness her assault in incredibly grim, drawn-out detail. The patience that Sômai requires of his audience is something he employs throughout his entire filmography. Yet, in those minutes of unbroken footage, something ephemeral is brought to the surface. Sometimes a shot effortlessly morphs from a walk through a summer festival into a visual existential journey, like in MOVING (1993), and other times the long takes reveal what is being left unspoken: society’s propensity to ignore its problems (as examined in TYPHOON CLUB).
Making your way through Sômai’s films, you cannot escape various recurring motifs; scenes of characters walking through the rain, being drenched by a bucket of water, pushed into a pool, or even a storm lashing against the windows. Water is a symbol of life, and the characters of these films are constantly in motion, moving towards growth or maybe even away from it. The storms surge outside as the teenagers of TYPHOON CLUB battle with their own expectations to grow and eventually fall into the machinations of society. Similarly, Sômai uses song and dance as a release and expression against the social conformity expected of school-age children. P.P. RIDER ends with its heroes dancing — covered in blood and cocaine — out of celebration or simply even a need to be outside of themselves.
The arc of Shinji Sômai’s career showcases not only his talent but his ability to open the door towards traversing genres in Japanese cinema. His beginnings had exaggerated, high stakes, and by the nineties, he was mining familial dramas. But his perspective was never lost. Many of the films of this period, now dubbed the “lost decade of Japanese cinema,” have never been seen or celebrated outside of Japan. However, as the films of Sômai are becoming more widely available, his influence on Japanese independent cinema and other notable Japanese filmmakers — MOVING feeling like a natural precursor to the work of Hirokazu Kore-eda (SHOPLIFTERS, STILL WALKING) — are being reexamined years after his early death in 2001.
Interview by Todd Savage, Journalist and Doc Days Co-founder. Featured image by Yvonne Uwah.
FOR THE RECORD screened at AFS Cinema on Sunday, May 28, as part of the Texas Shorts program during Doc Days 2023. This AFS-supported short film chronicles the fate of publisher Laurie Ezzell Brown and her family-owned community newspaper, The Canadian Record, in the Texas Panhandle. Each week, the lifting of a green flag outside its offices on the main street signaled to townspeople the arrival of the latest edition of the paper, but for how much longer?
Heather Courtney and Paul Stekler spoke with Doc Days co-founder Todd Savage about their film and how a small-town newspaper reflects everything about community and connections. This interview transcript is edited for clarity.
FOR THE RECORD
Did you each read a community newspaper growing up? What was your relationship to your hometown newspaper?
Heather Courtney: I come from a small town in rural Michigan and far northern Michigan. My relationship with my town is very similar to Laurie’s: a love-hate relationship. I love where I’m from, and I love people there. But I also have a lot of different views [from the local people]. I really connected with Laurie and the paper and the town in that way. We do have a daily paper that’s pretty small and has managed to survive all the time. It’s called The Daily Mining Gazette since there used to be a lot of mining in that area, but not anymore.
Paul Stekler: We lived outside of New York, but we had a local paper as well. The paper was where you saw photographs and articles about the people that you knew, the July 4th celebrations, the Little League baseball box scores, where I found my name for the two points I had in a basketball game, and a picture of my dad at dog-training school with our untrainable Irish setter. It was different than all the New York papers, which were great, but they weren’t local. It was the paper of our community.
How did you find Laurie, and what appealed to you about her and her passion for community journalism?
Heather: Through a mutual friend of ours, a man named Bill Bishop who used to live in Austin and ran something called The Daily Yonder, which was a publication that did original reporting on rural issues and was an aggregator of rural stories from around the country. I used to touch base with him regularly to ask him any good ideas for real stories. One time when I did that, he said, “You should talk to Laurie Brown over at The Canadian Record in the Panhandle. They’re doing interesting stuff up there.” I contacted her and went up to spend 24 hours there. I realized I wanted to follow her and the paper. I just knew that it was a place that had a lot of potential, both Laurie and her town and her paper.
It seemed surprising to me that papers like hers have survived this long.
Paul: There’s been the decline of the economy in rural America for years and years, as the big box stores replace the mom-and-pop hardware stores and drugstores. The decline of papers is in some ways in line with what’s happened in rural America.
Co-producer Paul Stekler at the AFS Q&A for the TEXAS SHORTS program during Doc Days 2023. Photo by Yvonne Uwah.
What impressed you about Laurie?
Heather: I just loved everything she said about the importance of the paper. It made me realize how much integrity she had and how very authentic she was. These were issues that she has thought deeply about for a long time and has lived with for years. She believes so much in local journalism and real newspapers — it was really key to her to get the message out that these are important news institutions and something needs to be done to make sure they can be sustainable and survive. That was really what drove her.
What was your plan then about how to follow the story?
Heather: After that initial trip, I got really excited about it. I stayed in touch with her, and after I initially met her and did that first interview, I went back there and, again, had the same feeling. It seemed even more important at the time because she had lost a key staff member or two. Things were becoming progressively harder for her to keep the paper going at that time. I thought, “I’ll come back every few months.”
Paul: Heather spent four years, often on location, making this short film, and it shows an incredible dedication, the kind of dedication that you need to be able to get those moments to be able to make something, like COVID happening in that town, organic to the story as opposed to a news flash that happens. Heather’s film has a compelling character and a good story. But I think the difference between a good film and a great film is that a great film has those elements, that compelling character, and Laurie is an incredibly compelling character. But it also is about a lot more, and it doesn’t knock you over the head with it. It’s about this whole change in rural America, the decline and disappearance of newspapers, and the consequences—not only for the town—but also for our democracy, for our ability to be able to know what’s going on and to be able to have democratic dialogue.
FOR THE RECORD
What do you hope audiences take from your film, from witnessing Laurie’s long days and nights covering the community of Canadian?
Heather: I hope audiences will take how important it is to have a local news source, particularly in rural areas, but actually anywhere. In fact, Laurie and I showed the film in Detroit at the Detroit Free-Press Film Festival last month. And you know, The Detroit Free Press is going through the same thing only, you know, obviously, on a larger scale. Seven years ago, they had over 300 employees; now they have less than 100. It just goes to show that it’s really a problem everywhere. There’s the statistics in the film that show 20% of Americans live in the news deserts, and one in four newspapers have shut down in the last 15 years. And there’s all this research that says when that happens, when there’s no local news source, that people tend to vote less. Public officials are more corrupt because there’s nobody there checking what they’re doing. People are just less active in their town, and the community becomes more divided. A lot of people don’t realize that — they’re like, “Oh, I can just get the news online, I’ll just look online.”
But no, it’s not about that. It’s about knowing what’s going on in your community. Laurie talks about this very well in the film, about how news about the community helps the community come together in a way and makes them feel that they matter. I think when you lose that local news source, you lose that.
Interview by Todd Savage, Journalist and Doc Days Co-founder. Featured image by Heather Leah Kennedy.
NAKED GARDENS screened Friday, May 26, at AFS Cinema as a part of Doc Days 2023. It is the latest film from AFS-supported filmmakers Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan (PAHOKEE), who literally bared all in making their portrait of a nudist community at the Sunsport Gardens resort in Florida. Our Doc Days co-founder, Todd Savage, talked with the filmmakers about their visual inspiration and hopes for the film. This interview transcript is edited for clarity.
Watching the residents of the resort in your film, I was in awe of them, these people who are so comfortable being naked and going about their days, and I was wondering, what does that feel like to be so free and not so aware of your body?
Patrick Bresnan: We love recording communities that may not exist and may never have been documented. They just kind of pass into the ether. It’s a place that I don’t think will be there in five years because the owner will pass away. The real estate is so valuable. It’s in West Palm Beach. This film was a wonderful opportunity to record a naturist community that is — it’s a Bernie Sanders nudist resort because the owner finances it being affordable. You know, he’s not in it to make money, whereas over 90% of the nudist resorts out there are businesses. This is a place that a retiree from upstate New York bought and turned into an affordable housing family nudist resort. That was not discrimination — there are people of color, and most nudist resorts are all-white retirees. And so, in all its failings, its ideology was so interesting. It’s an ideology that’s not sustainable in a capitalist world.
It’s like you’re almost, you know, documenting a kind of lost tribe in the Amazon or something before it disappears.
Patrick: I agree.
How long did you live there?
Ivete Lucas: Six months. I was there during my pregnancy and lived the pregnancy naked. By the end of our filming, the pandemic started and the lockdown started. And I flew to Austin and had my baby.
How did you change? How did your relationship with your own body change?
Ivete: I lived the pregnancy naked. That was really beautiful. Like, really to see my body. I also did have to use a lot of sunblock. [laughs] Because you know, with nudity and pregnancy in the sun, you can get spots and stuff. But there was a midwife and a doula there who were keeping an eye on me, helping me out when I was getting overheated or whatever. I always felt taken care of, and I had a big connection with my body as it was changing. What is really, really important — and even more for women — is we’re always, always scrutinized by what our body is doing. And when we have a child, our body changes. I kept going back to my experience being there and thinking, “Wow, those things that my brain thinks don’t matter,” you know, and I lived it. I could use that to check myself and feel better about it. It also translated into judging other people. Now when I see somebody’s weight fluctuating or changes in their body, I have so much more sympathy and empathy for them. There’s probably some stuff going on. I don’t even need to know, it’s just people are allowed to have their bodies go through different periods.
Filmmakers Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan at AFS Cinema for Doc Days 2023. Photo by Heather Leah Kennedy.
The film paints such a vivid picture of the world where your subjects live. Were there any films or visual sources that inspired your approach to the way you shot and edited the film?
Patrick: I was looking at photography to get inspired for this film. I’m a big fan of Diane Arbus. Some of her monumental photos are at nudist resorts. Another photographer we were looking at a lot was Dorothea Lange who photographed families that had moved because of the Dust Bowl and labor camps and people living in improvisational housing. We really thought of the nudist resort and the families that were there because of financial reasons.
Ivete: Our films have been described as verité and as observational, which we don’t use because we feel like we’re much more involved than a fly on the wall. We don’t sit and observe people — we live with them. I feel that our films are an evolution of street photography. One of the films that has inspired me before I met Patrick is Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! It’s just putting images together and having them talk to each other, and that creates new meaning. The images were like moving photographs and trying to capture a culture. I think with those influences and the desire to present the human body in a way that was free from the traditional male gaze and the sexualization of bodies, that’s what created the approach that we took with NAKED GARDENS.
Were you always interested in nudism? How did you find this story?
Patrick: We had been working in Palm Beach County because my family lives there. We’ve been working with high school students, and we were just desperate to do something that was not as traditional. We wanted to get away from the doc mold of the social issue story. We wanted to challenge the audience to just see the naked body. We wanted to make a film where we challenged people to even walk into the cinema.
Ivete: We’re always trying to look for expressions of culture and realities that people create. We’re always trying to broaden and deepen the understanding of who we are as Americans and what we are as people. When we came across Sunsport, they were ready to participate in a project where they could shatter the stereotypes of what nudists were to people in the mainstream media. Once we also disrobed with them and participated in it, we realized that, actually, you know, the naked body is free. But when you’re going to bring the camera in and when you’re going to make a movie about it, you have to be extremely sensitive. There have to be rules. Our first rule was that we’re going to be naked with them. We weren’t going to point cameras at people who weren’t wearing clothes.
That must have made a huge difference. I mean, especially if you’re not people who are living there, you’re having your own experience.
Ivete: Your own experience informs the film.
What was that kind of journey for you? After the first day, did you forget you were naked and think, “I’m cool with this” and kind of forget?
Patrick: I don’t think you’re cool with it. Right away for sure. We went in there the first time, and we wore clothing, and we just felt so awkward. Because people are just by the pool, they’re happy. They are who they are, and they’re right there for you to see. There’s definitely a performance in nudism where you’re saying, “This is me, this is my body … Let’s see yours.” After breaking the ice and taking our clothes off — which was always very difficult — even though we worked naked, I mean, I’m not a nudist.
Ivete: It’s not comfortable to be naked full time.
Patrick: You’d wear gym shorts and pull them down and take your shirt off. You’re like, “Oh man, here I go!”
Did you find yourself judging or forming opinions based on what you saw?
Patrick: When we first were there, we were judging ourselves enormously and definitely judging others. You’re trying to understand people’s intentions. Until you get to know them, there’s a mystery about them, and you assume things. And you’re almost always wrong. When we first got naked and saw other people’s bodies — and there were a number of people who were what we would consider overweight — and you judge them. By the end of making the film, we understood who they were and why they were a certain body type. And we loved them. There was no judgment. You’re going through a process of cleansing a lot of stereotypes that you have in the clothed world. You’re going through a process of accepting people for who they are.
Ivete: In the films we make, it is about the journey of the audience, as much as it is about our journey. Especially when we work with groups or people who are stigmatized, the audience comes in with baggage. They will have to challenge themselves by meeting the people and going deep with them. One thing is to get naked and go into a sauna, and another thing is to live your life naked. If a traditional documentary person would come and ask questions, people would give them, like, the answers they’d want to hear. But if you spend enough time with people, those layers come off and the reality of why some people want to live naked — to heal things with their bodies — comes out. Then you really have to face yourself and the reasons why you’re judging people.
Our brains are imprinted with all of these fantasies and idealized versions of the human body. What do you hope that people take away from spending time seeing all of your characters and the way they live?
Ivete: There’s a trauma in looking different, you know, just people with diverse body types that are never represented. That creates anxiety and a lot of mental health issues. They think that they’re so weird. But at the end of the day, when they all come together, it’s like, “Oh, humans look like this.”
Interview by Todd Savage, Journalist and Doc Days Co-founder. Featured image by Heather Leah Kennedy.
GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT screened Sunday, May 28, at AFS Cinema as a part of Doc Days 2023. Winner of the 2023 Sundance Grand Jury Award, the documentary charts the long career of one of America’s greatest living poets, orators, and social commentators. Our Doc Days co-founder Todd Savage talked with the filmmakers, Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, about what Nikki Giovanni has been to their lives and their vision for the film. This interview transcript is edited for clarity.
GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT
I wanted to start and ask you each, like, what was your first exposure to Nikki Giovanni and what do you recall of it?
Joe Brewster: My exposure was listening to her on the radio in Los Angeles as a kid. She was popular on the radio, and I knew something was different — that this was not rhythm and blues. It was something else. I had a sense of euphoria when I heard her read a poem which said to me on popular radio that I was important and I have a history and I should be proud of the work that my ancestors have done.
Michèle Stephenson: For me, I’m part of the Caribbean migration to Canada. I’m of Haitian descent. My earliest memory of Nikki is really part of a larger coming of age and looking for Black female icons and artists and writers during my college years. For me, college was a moment to solidify my sense of identity to a larger Black diaspora, Caribbean diaspora, and beyond, and I took a lot of different courses in the space. She was exposed to me as I was reading her poetry as well as works of Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison and other Black female artists of her generation. It was part of this very intentional search for connection in college.
How did you reach out to her, and what was your process of kind of gaining her participation? I would expect she had been asked many times.
Joe: There are thousands of videos of her online. She has spoken a few times a week for the last 50 years at universities around the country. So it was our surprise that there was no major work. We just asked her, and she said, “Yeah.” She said, “I never say no.” That is not true.
She did refuse to answer a few questions in your film.
Joe: Not answering that made it a better piece because it forced us to come up with other ways of getting at her emotionally and delving into her, her psychological makeup. We had to do it using poetry. Because everything emotionally that she refused to say in an interview, she said in poetry one way or another.
Michèle: She’s actually a very accessible person. She’s taught at Virginia Tech for decades. Her spouse, Ginny, is her scheduler and sets all of her schedule in arrangements. We had a Zoom conversation, and they said, “Yeah, come on over and meet us.” I went down for a weekend, and they opened the bottles of Champagne and partied with their friends. I arrived at the right time. We clicked and they said, “Yeah, let’s make it happen.”
Filmmakers Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster answering questions at AFS Cinema after screening GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT at Doc Days 2023. Photo by Heather Leah Kennedy.
With so much material to review, how did you approach telling the story of an artist with such a large body of work?
Michèle: That took a very long time, figuring out what was important. We started with gaining a fuller knowledge of the timeline of her life but also what was significant about her work during these different decades. There was a clear impact and pattern to the evolution of her work and to the kind of statements she was making about society and personally, too. Those impactful moments in these different decades of her life informed us — knowing that we were not going to make a traditional biopic. I call it an anti-biopic. It’s a poem itself, a poem that honors the impact of poetry but, in particular, her artistic impact and process. The artistry and its impact is what drove us. We explored with our editor what the framing would be, and that’s when “Going to Mars,” her poem itself, became our glue from which everything emanated.
Joe: We are always faced with this dilemma with every film. We have a mountain of clay, not just a little bit of clay. The question is, how do you shape that clay? Michèle is driven by her background and a need for equity. I was a psychiatrist, so I’m interested in her makeup. We basically began to explore. We also understand that we have to be patient. We knew we wanted to play with the form. We knew we wanted to play with time and space. We knew that the documentary was being changed in terms of how you tell the story. Now, everything including the kitchen sink can be used to make a documentary.
Michèle: You can’t cover someone’s full life in a documentary. You have to decide, what is the message? What is the theme? For us, the poetry was central but also our visual treatment of it. There would be a singular theme that would be running through the film so that the film itself was a poem. We even cut in stanzas. We’ll build these stanzas of our own with their own mini themes that we might be able to move around and figure out a larger visual poem.
Filmmakers Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster at AFS Cinema for Doc Days 2023. Photo by Heather Leah Kennedy.
Why do you think this is a good moment for this film and sharing Nikki’s work and introducing her to a new audience?
Michèle: I think any moment would be good to introduce her. We took seven years to make the film. People in the space where we were raising money didn’t really know Nikki, so there was this extra hurdle. It took the time that it took, and I like to say that, you know, all of those are opportunities for us. The time that it took helped us to perfect our craft and to honor her work.
Joe: This film is evergreen. What we’ve noticed is that every audience that we’ve taken the film to has been emotionally moved. We’ve gotten messages back, “I can’t get it out of my mind.”
Michèle: This idea of evergreen is a powerful one for us. Poetry has an evergreen nature to it if it’s strong. We read poems from the 18th and 19th century, moments of Shakespeare. We hope that this resonates beyond the specificity of our historical moment as well and that there’s a level of our common humanity that can be recognized for people who come back 50 years from now to experience the film and the words that Nikki has to say. I think even the films that reflect the specific historical moment, whether it’s her MLK poem or the poem on violence, these are all things that have been around since millennia in terms of how do we resist? How do we react to violent oppression, how to react to the death of people that are dear to us? These are human reactions that I think transcend specific historical moments.
It was interesting to witness Nikki’s interactions with her granddaughter and the link between generations.
Michèle: This idea of passing it on to the next generation became this theme because of her reflections on her legacy. We touched upon the fact that her granddaughter hadn’t really had that close of a relationship with Nikki. And Nikki was really hungry for it. We were able to capture the very first moment — her granddaughter is at Nikki’s home — which we’re very grateful to have been able to document. The granddaughter’s fresh look became just golden for us in terms of storytelling and looking at the circularity of life and what does it mean to pass on to the next generation? There’s a level of sort of interstellar aspect to it too. I don’t want to leave Mars out or space out — and I don’t want to get too philosophical — but it was being with Nikki at this moment in her life with the opportunity to be able to document what this next generation could mean and what that embodies through her granddaughter.
Joe: There’s all of this conversation lately about Afro-Futurism and, and for me, her granddaughter is the future. She is Afrofuturism. It’s the next generation. It was so poignant that I am always in tears when she appears in the film. We understand that this is a passing of a baton.
