Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five NYC performers search for a meal in a Queens market while speaking in verse. A meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next. Inspired by the writing of Filipino-America poet Paolo Javier.
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2022 Director: Lynne A. Sachs Runtime: 7 minutes Screenwriter: Pablo Javier Language: English, Tagalog Cast: Inney Prakash, Ray Ferriera, Country: United States Jeff Preiss, Juliana Sass, Premiere: Chicago Premiere Caredral
Counter Compositions – Truth to Material
This work started with a single reel of B/W silent film. This found footage having been disassociated from its intention raises questions about the unseen and forgotten aspects of workers lives and technological histories. The images focus on the bodies and gestures of the persons working within this factory environment.
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2022 Filmmaker: Simon Rattigan Runtime: 14 minutes Language: English Country: United Kingdom
Amnesia
I get rid of memories selectively, as a form of self-salvation. A playback of the episodes I have lived renders no clue of who I think I am in the present. I guess many “me” reside in different parts of my memory. And the me of the present chooses to eliminate one of them.
Like the
replicant interrogated in Blade Runner, the person I am now is subjected to the
scathing gaze of others. And now he decides to disintegrate his existential
consciousness, by sending that of the past into exile, to the horizon where it
truly belongs.
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2020 Filmmaker: Yan Zhou Runtime: 6 minutes Language: English, Mandarin Chinese Country: China, United States Premiere: US Premiere
Fraktura
Fraktura is an abstract horror evoking a unique German expressionist atmosphere. Featuring lead type from the Gutenberg Museum (Mainz) and printing blocks from the Hatch Show Print (Nashville), the typographic forms, printed directly on 35mm film, move to the rhythm of an original score performed on a church organ.
“I made this film for the artist Haruko Tanaka. It is footage I shot in the summer of 2018 when I was in residence at the Putnam Cottage at MacDowell, a studio Haruko had worked in the winter before. I often thought of her in the month I was there. Haruko passed a few months after I returned; I made this film in her memory.” – Lee Anne Schmitt
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2021 Director: Lee Anne Schmitt Runtime: 10 minutes Screenwriter: Lee Anne Schmitt Language: English Producer: Lee Anne Schmitt Country: United States Premiere: World Premiere
A City w/o A Map
signal communications proliferate across borders. incongruent shapes subtracted from form. fractal topographies without document.
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2021 Director: Josh Weissbach Runtime: 8 minutes Producer: Josh Weissbach Language: English Country: United States, Cuba, Israel Premiere: US Premiere
Nullo
A fascinating portrait of an individual with penis dysmorphia who appears to be much happier and content without the very appendage that provides many men – especially gay men – with their entire raison d’être. (Bruce LaBruce) read full text: https://www.sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/2679/
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2021 Director: Jan Soldat Runtime: 16 minutes Language: German Country: Australia, Germany Premiere: Midwest Premiere
Incantation
A serendipitous ritual of memory Colliding archives of body and place A cine-incantation to freedom and (be)longing
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2021 Filmmaker: Kalpana Subramanian Runtime: 9 minutes Language: English Country: United States, India
A.I. Mama
A young programmer attempts to resurrect their lost mother by building an A.I. with human memories
Showings: Sun, Jul 31st, 4:30 PM @ Logan Theatre
Year: 2020 Director: Asuka Lin Runtime: 5 minutes Screenwriter: Asuka Lin Country: United States Producer: Giuliana Foulkes Premiere: Midwest Premiere Cast: Reinabe
Cynthia
Andrews was born
in Brooklyn, New York and raised in both Brooklyn and Queens. She is a former
actress, dancer and singer, as well as a notable performance poet and veteran
of the NYC poetry circuit. Her performance at The Nuyorican Poets Café was one
of the first to be archived at Poet’s House. She has been published in various
publications including ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The
Voice Literary Supplement, The 2020 Beat Poets Anthology,
and Tribes Literary Journal, where she has also written film
and book reviews. She is the author of two chapbooks: Saving
Summer and Homeless (The New Press), and one poetry
collection: A Little Before Twelve (Poets of Queens). She
holds a Certificate of Language and Culture from Jagiellonian University in
Krakow, Poland, as well as a B.A. from Adelphi University and an MFA in
Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.
Pauline
Findlay is a poet,
filmmaker of shorts (poetry in motion) and chef. Her new book Dysfunction:
A Play On Words In the Familiar, released by Pink Trees Press is one that
will walk you down a winding road to leave you to choose; the road of
redemption or a dysfunctional circus. One of the original Silver Tongued Devils
her work appears in their anthology as well as Brownstone Poets. She’s
performed at Fahrenheit, Women of Color and Tree of Cups the Rimes Series.
Findlay has judged poetry contests and collection of videos can be viewed on YouTube.
Her method towards writing is simple, “I don’t write in things I don’t believe
in.”
tova greene (they/them) is a non-binary,
queer, jewish poet who recently graduated with a bachelor in liberal arts from
sarah lawrence college in yonkers, new york. they were one of seven members of
the class of 2022 to submit a senior thesis; at a whopping 375 pages, “the
poetic is political” specialized in the intersection between twentieth
century american poetry & feminist theory. as a part of this year-long
endeavor, they created a chronological anthology of the american feminist
poetry movement from 1963-1989 entitled who can tolerate the power of a woman
(after “propaganda poem: maybe for some young mamas” by alicia
ostriker). their debut collection lilac on the damned’s breath was
published via bottlecap press in june of 2022. they are currently working on
their second book of poetry, ohso. they are a two-time gryphon
grant recipient & received the dean’s scholarship throughout their
undergraduate education. after interning with the poetry society of new york
from march to august of 2021, they were invited back as the program coordinator
in may 2022. in this capacity, they are currently producing the new york city
poetry festival. their work has been featured in eunoia review, midway
journal, love & squalor, clickbait, soul
talkmagazine, & primavera zine. they currently
live in manhattan with their partner & cat.
Emily
Hockaday’s first
full length book, Naming the Ghost, is out from Cornerstone Press
September 2022. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently the
ecology-themed Beach Vocabulary from Red Bird Chaps. Her poems
have appeared in a number of journals in print and online, and she can be found
on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com.
She tweets @E_Hockaday.
Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black
Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize, and four chapbooks: Vigil (Get
Fresh Books), Tropicália (Newfound, winner of the Newfound
Prose Prize), Amblyopia (Bull City Press), and Translation (Paper
Nautilus). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon
Review Online, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Poet
Lore, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The
Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural
Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan
Publishers, for her fiction manuscript-in-progress. She has an MA in
Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers
University, Newark.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems.
Please watch the January 17th PoQ reading here. Please watch the March 14th PoQ reading here. Please watch the May 16 PoQ reading here.
Mission
Poets of Queens creates a community for poetry in Queens and beyond.
Readings create a connection between a diverse group of poets and an audience. In 2020 an anthology of poetry by a group of twenty-five poets was published. This paved the way for Poets of Queens to start to publish individual collections to help poets connect to their community through their work. Connections are furthered when visual artists respond to poets and poets respond to visual artists as part of special projects. Poets also become mentors and teachers to fellow poets in all stages of their careers, strengthening community.
This month’s nonfiction picks include a reflection on a father, a immersive dive into the fishing industry and an alternative approach to the rock band biopic doc.
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
In “Film About
a Father Who,” the director Lynne Sachs sorts through her feelings about her
elusive, problematic dad, Ira Sachs Sr. The movie, which mixes film and video
formats, brings together footage that Lynne shot over more than 30 years along
with other material from her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (“Love
Is Strange”), and Ira Sr. himself.
Right from the
start, Ira Sr. sounds like a bit of a flake. Lynne, explaining what her dad did
for a living, calls him “a hippie businessman, buying land so steep you
couldn’t build, bottling mineral water he couldn’t put on the shelves, using
other people’s money to develop hotels named for flowers.” He also seems to
have been a serial compartmentalizer. That trait may have been harmless enough
when it came to extravagances (he owned twin Cadillac convertibles and kept one
secret), but it caused a great deal of drama for his family. Lynne interviews
some of the women Ira Sr. had been involved with and the many children he
fathered, including two grown half sisters Lynne didn’t know about until 2016.
Did she have suspicions, you might ask? Lynne suggests that Ira Sr.’s
secret-keeping led her and her siblings to adopt a stance of what she calls
“complicit ignorance.” And Ira Sr.’s mother, called Maw-Maw by Lynne, only
complicated matters when she was alive, because, Lynne says, she “could not
take the constant flow of people that she was supposed to, quote, ‘love,’ in
the way that we’re taught to love family.”
In interviews,
Ira Sr. nevertheless comes across as a genial lug — maybe fun at parties, but
surely a handful to have as a father or a partner. “Film About a Father Who,”
whose title was inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s “Film About a Woman Who,” is a
consideration of how one man’s easygoing attitude yielded anything but an easy
family dynamic as it rippled across generations. The movie runs only 74
minutes, but it contains lifetimes.
Some
documentaries aim to impose order on the world. “Leviathan,” by contrast,
revels in abstraction and disorientation, as Dennis
Lim noted in 2012 when profiling the filmmakers for The New York
Times. The co-directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab,
a group that merges the academic discipline of ethnography with the artistic
possibilities of filmmaking, shot it during six trips aboard a Massachusetts
fishing trawler. But it’s hardly an exposé or elucidation of the fishing
industry. It opens with a quote from the Book of Job and unleashes a furious
torrent of images in which it’s often difficult to know which way is up or even
whether it’s day or night.
As the title
implies, the human presence is something of a secondary concern next to the
monstrous churn of the sea or the clanking, threatening chains of the boat’s
equipment. The waterlogged, slicker-wearing fishermen aren’t identified until
the closing credits; their voices are often barely possible to understand (the
distortions of their words suggest Charlie Brown’s teacher fed through some
sort of metallic feedback), and their routines are never explained.
In interviews,
the filmmakers noted that they sought to surrender some of their agency to the
elements. Waterproof cameras get dragged underwater like a fishing net or
pulled above the surface to skip along with some hovering seabirds. They slosh
around on the floor with the day’s catch, as much a part of the detritus as the
ginger-ale can that rattles around in a pile of shells. Shooting at
ultra-close-range from boot height or at odd angles, Paravel and
Castaing-Taylor offer perspectives on the way the boat looks and sounds that
seem untethered from where our eyes would naturally dart for meaning. It’s so
vivid that at times, you swear you can smell the ship as well.
Todd Haynes
doesn’t exactly reinvent the rock-band-biopic documentary in “The Velvet Underground,”
but there are times when he seems pretty close to it. The title is in some ways
a misnomer: The focus isn’t so much on the band as the Warholian cultural
ferment of the 1960s that the group grew out of. (It’s more underground and
less, uh, velvet.) Dedicated to the memory of Jonas
Mekas, who appears, and featuring excerpts from films by him and
film-artist contemporaries like Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage and many others,
Haynes’s movie is as interested in picture, sound and sensation as it is in
recording history.
The copious use
of split screen evokes Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls,” a work that places imagery
from two projectors side by side while the soundtrack alternates between the
film strips, allowing viewers to draw connections. In a similar spirit, Haynes
is devoted to capturing the cultural crosscurrents that shaped the band and its
members.
John Cale, one
of the band’s founders, speaks of the influence of experimental musicians like
John Cage and La Monte Young on the music he was making. Later, offering a
fan’s perspective, the musician Jonathan Richman talks about hearing “overtones
that you couldn’t account for” while seeing the Velvet Underground play. The
film critic Amy Taubin draws a link between Warhol’s silent films — meant to be
played at the slower-than-standard speed of 16 frames per second — and the
avant-garde music scene: “It was all about extended time.”
Haynes’s film
doesn’t avoid standard biographical details. There are tales of Lou Reed’s
prickliness and a long section about what happened to the band after its
game-changing (if famously not best-selling) first album. But you don’t have to
be interested in the music, or music at all, to appreciate “The Velvet
Underground” as a movie.
The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is extending invitations to 397
distinguished artists and executives to join the organization in 2022.
Membership selection is based on professional qualifications, with an ongoing
commitment to representation, inclusion and equity. This year’s class of
invitees includes 71 Oscar nominees, including 15 winners.
A
selection of this year’s invitees includes Michael Greyeyes (Wild Indian)
to the Actors branch, Elodie Demey (Summer of 85) to Casting Directors,
Martin Ruhe (The Tender Bar) to Cinematographers, Paul Tazewell (West
Side Story) to Costume Designers, Andrew Ahn (Fire
Island) to Directors, and Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh (Writing With
Fire) to Documentary.
Also,
Shannon Baker Davis (The Photograph) has been invited to Film
Editors, Stacey Morris (Coming
2 America) to Makeup Artists and Hairstylists, Leo Heiblum and Jacobo
Lieberman (Frida)to Music, Shih-Ching Tsou (The Florida
Project) to Producers, set decorator Ellen Brill (Being the Ricardos)
to Production Design, Charlotte De La Gournerie (Flee) to Short Films
and Feature Animation, production sound mixer Denise Yarde (Belfast) to
Sound, Hayley Hubbard (The Old Guard) to Visual Effects, and Jeremy O
Harris (Zola) to Writers.
Finally,
Amber Rasberry (Sr. Creative Film Executive at Amazon) to Executives, Stephanie
Dee Phillips (EVP of Publicity at Focus) to Marketing and Public Relations, and
Ilda Santiago (Executive Director of Programming, Festival do Rio) are among
those invited to Members-at-Large.
The 2022 invitees are:
ACTORS
Funke
Akindele
Caitríona Balfe
Reed Birney
Jessie Buckley
Lori Tan Chinn
Daniel K. Daniel
Ariana DeBose
Robin de Jesús
Jamie Dornan
Michael Greyeyes
Gaby Hoffmann
Amir Jadidi
Kajol
Troy Kotsur
Vincent Lindon
BarBara Luna
Aïssa Maïga
Selton Mello
Olga Merediz
Sandra Kwan Yue Ng
Hidetoshi Nishijima
Rena Owen
Jesse Plemons
Sheryl Lee Ralph
Renate Reinsve
Marco Rodriguez
Joanna Scanlan
Kodi Smit-McPhee
Suriya
Anya Taylor-Joy
CASTING DIRECTORS
Rich Delia
Elodie Demey
Yngvill Kolset Haga
Louise Kiely
Meagan Lewis
Karen Lindsay-Stewart
Juliette Ménager
Kate Ringsell
Toby Whale
CINEMATOGRAPHERS
Ava Berkofsky
Josh Bleibtreu
Alice Brooks
Daria D’Antonio
Mike Eley
Sturla Brandth Grøvlen
Ruben Impens
Shabier Kirchner
Martin Ruhe
Kasper Tuxen
COSTUME DESIGNERS
Joan Bergin
Antonella Cannarozzi
Andrea Flesch
Lizzy Gardiner
Dorothée Guiraud
Suzie Harman
Tatiana Hernández
Louise Stjernsward
Paul Tazewell
Mitchell Travers
DIRECTORS
Newton Aduaka
Andrew Ahn
Bruno Villela Barreto
Mariano Barroso
Rolf de Heer
Jeferson Rodrigues de
Rezende
Pawo Choyning Dorji*
Blessing Egbe
Briar Grace-Smith
Reinaldo Marcus Green
Ryusuke Hamaguchi*
Sian Harries Heder*
Gil Kenan
Amanda Kernell
Mary Lambert
Blackhorse Lowe
Nalin Pan
Jonas Poher Rasmussen*
Isabel Sandoval
Amy Seimetz
Rachel Talalay
DOCUMENTARY
Julie Anderson
Susan Bedusa
Opal H. Bennett
Shane Boris
Joe Cephus Brewster
Ellen Bruno
Traci A. Curry
Jason DaSilva
Emílio Domingos
Sushmit Ghosh
Lyn Goldfarb
Susanne Guggenberger
Cristina Ibarra
Oren Jacoby
Isaac Julien
Deborah Kaufman
Firouzeh Khosrovani
Jessica Kingdon
Mehret Mandefro
Mary Manhardt
Amanda McBaine
Peter Jay Miller
Elizabeth Mirzaei
Gulistan Mirzaei
Bob Moore
Omar Mullick
Mohammed Ali Naqvi
Sierra Pettengill
Ben Proudfoot
Jonas Poher Rasmussen*
Gabriel Rhodes
Lynne Sachs
Brett Story
Thorsten Thielow
Rintu Thomas
Nathan Truesdell
Jenni Wolfson
Jialing Zhang
EXECUTIVES
Steve Asbell
Carole Baraton
Steven Bardwil
Jeff Blackburn
Liesl Copland
Kareem Daniel
Eva Diederix
Scott Foundas
Brenda Gilbert
Joshua Barnett Grode
Gene Yoonbum Kang
Jenny Marchick
Ori Joseph Marmur
Anna Marsh
Katherine Oliver
Joel Pearlman
Elizabeth Polk
Louie Provost
Amber Rasberry
Brian Robbins
Marc Schaberg
Ron Schwartz
Aditya Sood
Frederick Tsui
Dana Walden
Clifford Werber
FILM EDITORS
Geraud Brisson
Olivier Bugge Coutté
Shannon Baker Davis
Billy Fox
Myron Kerstein
Jeremy Milton
Úna Ní Dhonghaíle
Heike Parplies
Joshua L. Pearson
Peter Sciberras
Aljernon Tunsil
Azusa Yamazaki
MAKEUP ARTISTS AND HAIRSTYLISTS
Jacenda Burkett
Nana Fischer
Sean Flanigan
Massimo Gattabrusi
Stephanie Ingram
Anna Carin Lock
Heike Merker
Stacey Morris
Justin Raleigh
Kerrie Smith
Nadia Stacey
Julia Vernon
Wakana Yoshihara
MARKETING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS
Dana Archer
Debra Birnbaum
Tatiana Detlofson
Bethan Anna Dixon
Britta Gampper
Jane Gibbs
Sheri Goldberg
Jonathan Helfgot
Jessica Kolstad
Cortney Lawson
Vivek Mathur
George Nicholis
Stephanie Sarah Northen
Jodie Magid Oriol
Gina Pence
Stephanie Dee Phillips
Chrissy Quesada
Stuart Robertson
Jerry Rojas
Evelyn Santana
Sohini Sengupta
Michelle Slavich
James Verdesoto
Katrina Wan
Glen Erin Wyatt
MUSIC
Billie Eilish Baird O’Connell
Amie Doherty
Lili Haydn
Leo Heiblum
Natalie Holt
Nathan Johnson
Jacobo Lieberman
Ariel Rose Marx
Hesham Nazih
Finneas O’Connell
Dan Romer
Nerida Tyson-Chew
PRODUCERS
Mariela Besuievsky
Cale Boyter
Chad Burris
Damon D’Oliveira
Luc Déry
Michael Downey
Yaël Fogiel
Cristina Gallego
Laetitia Gonzales
Pauline Gygax
Margot Hand
Jojo Hui
Eva Jakobsen
Lucas Joaquin
Lizette Jonjic
Thanassis Karathanos
Kim McCraw
Sev Ohanian
Christina Piovesan
Natalie Qasabian
Philippe Rousselet
Sara Silveira
James Stark
Riccardo Tozzi
Shih-Ching Tsou
Nadia Turincev
Tim White
Trevor White
Teruhisa Yamamoto
Olena Yershova
PRODUCTION DESIGN
François Audouy
Laura Ballinger Gardner
Chris Baugh
Ellen Brill
Joanna Bush
Christina Cecili
John Coven
Carol Flaisher
Sandy Hamilton
Ellen Lampl
Enrico Latella
Steven Lawrence
Melissa Levander
Drew Petrotta
Jean-Vincent Puzos
Maya Shimoguchi
SHORT FILMS AND FEATURE ANIMATION
Murad Abu Eisheh
Olivier Adam
Michael Arias
Evren Boisjoli
Maria Brendle
Sean Buckelew
Olivier Calvert
Enrico Casarosa
Karla Castañeda
Hugo Covarrubias
K.D. Dávila
Charlotte De La Gournerie
Luc Desmarchelier
Anton Dyakov
Brian Falconer
Youssef Joe Haidar
Andy Harkness
Pierre Hébert
Aneil Karia
Brooke Keesling
Nadine Lüchinger
Tadeusz Łysiak
Joe Mateo
Sharon Maymon
Kathleen McInnis
Yvett Merino
Alberto Mielgo
Les Mills
Jetzabel Moreno Hernández
Dan Ojari
Brian Pimental
Mikey Please
Erin Ramos
Mike Rianda
Doug Roland
Leo Sanchez
Marc J. Scott
Sarah Smith
Daniel Šuljić
Conrad Vernon
Pamela Ziegenhagen-Shefland
SOUND
Douglas Axtell
Nerio Barberis
Amanda Beggs
Adrian Bell
Joshua Berger
Paul (Salty) Brincat
Tom Yong-Jae Burns
Benjamin A. Burtt
Simon Chase
Brian Chumney
Richard Flynn
Albert Gasser
Lewis Goldstein
Theo Green
James Harrison
John Hayes
Ruth Hernandez
Huang Zheng
Thomas Huhn
David Husby
Allison Jackson
Paul Ledford
Leff Lefferts
Nancy MacLeod
Charles Maynes
Alan Meyerson
Casey Stone
Edward Tise
Jana Vance
Tara Webb
Waldir Xavier
Denise Yarde
VISUAL EFFECTS
Ivy Agregan
Geeta Basantani
Aharon Bourland
Ivan Busquets
Joe Ceballos
Richard Anthony Clegg
Mark Curtis
Markus Degen
Jack Edjourian
Eric Enderton
Marcos Fajardo Orellana
Joel Green
Earl Hibbert
Hayley Hubbard
Maia Kayser
Garrett Lam
Jake Maymudes
Catherine Ann Mullan
Charlie Noble
J. Alan Scott
Tefft Smith
Alan Travis
Michael Van Eps
Sean Noel Walker
Vernon Wilbert
Eric Jay Wong
Kevin Wooley
Wei Zheng
WRITERS
Zach Baylin
Henry Bean
Pawo Choyning Dorji*
Michael Grais
Ted Griffin
Ryusuke Hamaguchi*
Jeremy O Harris
Sian Harries Heder*
Mike Jones
Reema Kagti
Adele Lim
Craig Mazin
Margaret Nagle
Takamasa Oe
Alex Ross Perry
Adam Rifkin
Jordan Roberts
Katie Silberman
Randi Mayem Singer
Jon Spaihts
Małgorzata Szumowska
Mark A. Victor
MEMBERS-AT-LARGE
Keith Adams
Josiah Akinyele
Richard Berger
Andrew Birch
Andrew Cannava
George Drakoulias
Andrew Dunlap
Erin Dusseault
James Farrell
Valerie Flueger Veras
Andy Fowler
Glenn Kiser
Anne Lai
Susan Lazarus
Joe Machota
Leonard Maltin
Deborah McIntosh
Julia Michels
Daniel Rabinow
Ilda Santiago
Danie Streisand
Matt Sullivan
Anne Lajla Utsi
Matt Vioral
Michael Zink
(*Four
individuals — noted by an asterisk — have been invited to join the Academy by
multiple branches. These individuals must select one branch upon accepting
membership.)
According to an Academy-provided breakdown of the new
invitees, 44 percent are women, 37 percent are non-white and 50 percent are
non-Americans (54 different countries are represented).
Among those who
will henceforth be able to vote for the Oscar nominations and winners if they
accept, as the vast majority of people who have received invites historically
have: newly-minted Oscar winners Billie Eilish and Finneas
O’Connell (music branch) and Ariana DeBose and Troy
Kotsur (actors); Paramount chief Brian Robbins and
Disney general entertainment chief Dana Walden (executives);
and film critic Leonard Maltin (members-at-large).
According to an
Academy-provided breakdown of the new invitees, 44 percent are women, 37
percent are non-white and 50 percent are non-Americans (54 different countries
are represented). If they all accept, the Academy’s overall membership will be
34 percent female, 19 percent non-white and 23 percent non-American.
Seven branches
invited more women than men (actors, casting directors, costume designers,
documentary, makeup artists/hairstylists, marketing/public relations and
producers); three branches invited more non-whites than whites (actors,
directors and documentary); and nine branches invited more non-Americans than
Americans (actors, casting directors, cinematographers, costume designers,
directors, makeup artists/hairstylists, producers, short films/feature
animation and visual effects).
This year’s
list of invites is two
longer than last year’s, which was, by far, the smallest since the
#OscarsSoWhite uproar prompted a massive expansion of the organization. The
most invites came from the short films/feature animation branch (41), followed
by the documentary branch (38) and the actors branch (30).
Other notable
names invited to join the Academy this year include 2021 standout actors Caitriona
Balfe and Jamie Dornan (Belfast), Jessie
Buckley (The Lost Daughter), Gaby Hoffmann (C’mon
C’mon), Robin de Jesus (Tick, Tick … Boom!), Vincent
Lindon (Titane), Jesse Plemons and Kodi
Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog) and Anya Taylor-Joy (Last
Night in Soho); director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King
Richard); documentarians Traci A. Curry (Attica)
and Ben Proudfoot (The Queen of Basketball);
producers Tim White and Trevor White (King
Richard); and writers Zach Baylin (King Richard) and Jeremy
O Harris (Zola),
Veteran
entertainment industry figures who received invitations not tied to a specific
recent projects include Sheryl Lee Ralph (actors); Amy
Seimetz (directors); Scott Foundas (executives); Craig
Mazin, Alex Ross Perry and Katie Silberman (writers);
and George Drakoulias (members-at-large).
Among those
invited to join the marketing and public relations branch were DDA chief Dana
Archer, Amazon awards chief Debra
Birnbaum, international features specialist Tatiana Detlofson,
personal reps Sheri Goldberg and Jessica Kolstad, Magnolia
Pictures publicity chief George Nicholis, Apple TV+ awards
chief Gina Pence (who was central to CODA‘s
winning Oscar campaign), Focus Features’ executive vp publicity Stephanie
Phillips, Shelter PR evp awards and events Jerry Rojas and
Netflix’s US publicity chief Michelle Slavich.
Several people
were invited to join multiple branches and will have to select one,
including: Drive My Car‘s Ryusuke Hamaguchi (directors/writers), CODA‘s Sian
Heder (directors/writers) and Flee‘s Jonas Poher
Rasmussen (directors/documentary)
A full list of
those invited to join the Academy follows.
Actors
Funke Akindele – “Omo Ghetto: The Saga,” “Jenifa”
Caitríona Balfe – “Belfast,” “Ford v Ferrari”
Reed Birney – “Mass,” “Changeling”
Jessie Buckley – “The Lost Daughter,” “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”
Lori Tan Chinn – “Turning Red,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”
Daniel K. Daniel – “The Fugitive,” “A Soldier’s Story”
Ariana DeBose – “West Side Story,” “The Prom”
Robin de Jesús – “tick, tick…BOOM!,” “The Boys in the Band”
Jamie Dornan – “Belfast,” “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar”
Michael Greyeyes – “Wild Indian,” “Woman Walks Ahead”
Gaby Hoffmann – “C’mon C’mon,” “Wild”
Amir Jadidi – “A Hero,” “Cold Sweat”
Kajol – “My Name Is Khan,” “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…”
Troy Kotsur – “CODA,” “The Number 23”
Vincent Lindon – “Titane,” “The Measure of a Man”
BarBara Luna – “The Concrete Jungle,” “Five Weeks in a Balloon”
Aïssa Maïga – “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” “Mood Indigo”
Selton Mello – “My Hindu Friend,” “Trash”
Olga Merediz – “In the Heights,” “Adrift”
Sandra Kwan Yue Ng – “Echoes of the Rainbow,” “Portland Street Blues”
Hidetoshi Nishijima – “Drive My Car,” “Cut”
Rena Owen – “The Last Witch Hunter,” “The Dead Lands”
Jesse Plemons – “The Power of the Dog,” “Judas and the Black Messiah”
Sheryl Lee Ralph – “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit,” “The Distinguished
Gentleman”
Renate Reinsve – “The Worst Person in the World,” “Welcome to Norway”
Marco Rodriguez – “El Chicano,” “Unspeakable”
Joanna Scanlan – “After Love,” “Notes on a Scandal”
Kodi Smit-McPhee – “The Power of the Dog,” “Let Me In”
Suriya – “Jai Bhim,” “Soorarai Pottru”
Anya Taylor-Joy – “The Northman,” “Last Night in Soho”
Casting Directors Rich Delia – “King Richard,” “The Disaster Artist” Elodie Demey – “Happening,” “Summer of 85” Yngvill Kolset Haga – “The Worst Person in the World,” “One Night in Oslo” Louise Kiely – “The Green Knight,” “Sing Street” Meagan Lewis – “Blast Beat,” “Free State of Jones” Karen Lindsay-Stewart – “Marie Antoinette,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” Juliette Ménager – “A Bag of Marbles,” “As Above/So Below” Kate Ringsell – “The Lost City of Z,” “Justice League” Toby Whale – “Dunkirk,” “The History Boys”
Cinematographers
Ava Berkofsky – “The Sky Is Everywhere,” “Free in Deed”
Josh Bleibtreu – “Dark Phoenix,” “Shazam!”
Alice Brooks – “In the Heights,” “tick, tick…BOOM!”
Daria D’Antonio – “The Hand of God,” “Ricordi?”
Mike Eley – “The Duke,” “Woman Walks Ahead”
Sturla Brandth Grøvlen – “The Innocents,” “Another Round”
Ruben Impens – “Titane,” “Beautiful Boy”
Shabier Kirchner – “Small Axe,” “Bull”
Martin Ruhe – “The Tender Bar,” “The Midnight Sky”
Kasper Tuxen – “The Worst Person in the World,” “Riders of Justice”
Costume Designers Joan Bergin – “The Prestige,” “In the Name of the Father” Antonella Cannarozzi – “A Five Star Life,” “I Am Love” Andrea Flesch – “Midsommar,” “Colette” Lizzy Gardiner – “Hacksaw Ridge,” “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” Dorothée Guiraud – “Murder Party,” “French Tech” Suzie Harman – “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” “Extinction” Tatiana Hernández – “The Japon,” “Lope” Louise Stjernsward – “Made in Italy,” “The Mercy” Elisabeth Tavernier – “The Man in the Basement,” “Tanguy Is Back” Paul Tazewell – “West Side Story,” “Harriet” Mitchell Travers – “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” “Hustlers”
Directors Newton Aduaka – “One Man’s Show,” “Ezra” Andrew Ahn – “Fire Island,” “Spa Night” Bruno Villela Barreto – “Four Days in September,” “The Kiss” Mariano Barroso – “Ants in the Mouth,” “Ecstasy” Rolf de Heer – “Charlie’s Country,” “Bad Boy Bubby” Jeferson Rodrigues de Rezende – “The Malê Revolt,” “Bróder!” Pawo Choyning Dorji* – “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” Blessing Egbe – “African Messiah,” “Iquo’s Journal” Briar Grace-Smith – “Cousins ,” “Waru” Reinaldo Marcus Green – “King Richard,” “Monsters and Men” Ryusuke Hamaguchi* – “Drive My Car,” “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” Sian Harries Heder* – “CODA,” “Tallulah” Gil Kenan – “City of Ember,” “Monster House” Amanda Kernell – “Charter,” “Sami Blood” Mary Lambert – “The In Crowd,” “Pet Sematary II” Blackhorse Lowe – “Chasing the Light,” “5th World” Nalin Pan – “Last Film Show,” “Samsara” Jonas Poher Rasmussen* – “Flee,” “Searching for Bill” Isabel Sandoval – “Lingua Franca,” “Apparition” Amy Seimetz – “She Dies Tomorrow,” “Sun Don’t Shine” Rachel Talalay – “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting,” “Tank Girl”
Documentary Julie Anderson – “God Is the Bigger Elvis,” “Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World” Susan Bedusa – “Procession,” “Bisbee ’17” Opal H. Bennett – “A Broken House,” “Águilas” Shane Boris – “Stray,” “The Edge of Democracy” Joe Cephus Brewster – “American Promise,” “Slaying Goliath” Ellen Bruno – “Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy,” “Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia” Traci A. Curry – “Attica,” “Boss: The Black Experience in Business” Jason DaSilva – “When We Walk,” “When I Walk” Emílio Domingos – “Favela Is Fashion,” “L.A.P.A.” Sushmit Ghosh – “Writing with Fire,” “Timbaktu” Lyn Goldfarb – “Eddy’s World,” “With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade” Susanne Guggenberger – “Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes,” “The Beekeeper and His Son” Cristina Ibarra – “The Infiltrators,” “Las Marthas” Oren Jacoby – “On Broadway,” “Sister Rose’s Passion” Isaac Julien – “Derek,” “Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask” Deborah Kaufman – “Company Town,” “Blacks and Jews” Firouzeh Khosrovani – “Radiograph of a Family,” “Fest of Duty” Jessica Kingdon – “Ascension,” “Commodity City” Mehret Mandefro – “How It Feels to Be Free ,” “Little White Lie” Mary Manhardt – “Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl),” “Racing Dreams” Amanda McBaine – “Boys State,” “The Overnighters” Peter Jay Miller – “Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1,” “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport” Elizabeth Mirzaei – “Three Songs for Benazir,” “Laila at the Bridge” Gulistan Mirzaei – “Three Songs for Benazir,” “Laila at the Bridge” Bob Moore – “Dope Is Death,” “China Heavyweight” Omar Mullick – “Footprint,” “These Birds Walk” Mohammed Ali Naqvi – “Insha’Allah Democracy,” “Among the Believers” Sierra Pettengill – “Riotsville, USA,” “The Reagan Show” Ben Proudfoot – “The Queen of Basketball,” “A Concerto Is a Conversation” Jonas Poher Rasmussen* – “Flee,” “Searching for Bill” Gabriel Rhodes – “The First Wave,” “Time” Lynne Sachs – “Film about a Father Who,” “Investigation of a Flame” Brett Story – “The Hottest August,” “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” Thorsten Thielow – “The First Wave,” “Mayor Pete” Rintu Thomas – “Writing with Fire,” “Dilli” Nathan Truesdell – “Ascension,” “Balloonfest” Jenni Wolfson – “Pray Away,” “One Child Nation” Jialing Zhang – “In the Same Breath,” “One Child Nation”
Executives Steve Asbell Carole Baraton Steven Bardwil Jeff Blackburn Liesl Copland Kareem Daniel Eva Diederix Scott Foundas Brenda Gilbert Joshua Barnett Grode Gene Yoonbum Kang Jenny Marchick Ori Joseph Marmur Anna Marsh Katherine Oliver Joel Pearlman Elizabeth Polk Louie Provost Amber Rasberry Brian Robbins Marc Schaberg Ron Schwartz Aditya Sood Frederick Tsui Dana Walden Clifford Werber
Film Editors Geraud Brisson – “CODA,” “Dark Hearts” Olivier Bugge Coutté – “The Worst Person in the World,” “Thelma” Shannon Baker Davis – “The Obituary of Tunde Johnson,” “The Photograph” Billy Fox – “Dolemite Is My Name,” “Hustle & Flow” Myron Kerstein – “tick, tick…BOOM!,” “Crazy Rich Asians” Jeremy Milton – “Encanto,” “Zootopia” Úna Ní Dhonghaíle – “Belfast,” “Stan & Ollie” Heike Parplies – “Invisible Life,” “Toni Erdmann” Joshua L. Pearson – “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” Peter Sciberras – “The Power of the Dog,” “The King” Aljernon Tunsil – “Attica,” “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” Azusa Yamazaki – “Drive My Car,” “Asako I & II”
Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Jacenda Burkett – “King Richard,” “Concussion” Nana Fischer – “Encounter,” “The Lost City of Z” Sean Flanigan – “The Many Saints of Newark,” “The Irishman” Massimo Gattabrusi – “Loving Pablo,” “Volver” Stephanie Ingram – “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” “It” Anna Carin Lock – “House of Gucci,” “Borg/McEnroe” Heike Merker – “The Matrix Resurrections,” “Anonymous” Stacey Morris – “Coming 2 America,” “Dolemite Is My Name” Justin Raleigh – “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” “Army of the Dead” Kerrie Smith – “Motherless Brooklyn,” “John Wick” Nadia Stacey – “Cruella,” “The Favourite” Julia Vernon – “Cruella,” “Maleficent” Wakana Yoshihara – “Belfast,” “Spencer”
Marketing
and Public Relations
Dana Archer
Debra Birnbaum
Tatiana Detlofson
Bethan Anna Dixon
Britta Gampper
Jane Gibbs
Sheri Goldberg
Jonathan Helfgot
Jessica Kolstad
Cortney Lawson
Vivek Mathur
George Nicholis
Stephanie Sarah Northen
Jodie Magid Oriol
Gina Pence
Stephanie Dee Phillips
Chrissy Quesada
Stuart Robertson
Jerry Rojas
Evelyn Santana
Sohini Sengupta
Michelle Slavich
James Verdesoto
Katrina Wan
Glen Erin Wyatt
Music Billie Eilish Baird O’Connell – “No Time to Die” Amie Doherty – “Spirit Untamed,” “The High Note” Lili Haydn – “Strip Down, Rise Up,” “Broken Kingdom” Leo Heiblum – “Maria Full of Grace,” “Frida” Natalie Holt – “Fever Dream,” “Journey’s End” Nathan Johnson – “Nightmare Alley,” “Knives Out” Jacobo Lieberman – “Maria Full of Grace,” “Frida” Ariel Rose Marx – “Shiva Baby,” “Rebel Hearts” Hesham Nazih – “The Guest,” “Born a King” Finneas O’Connell – “No Time to Die” Dan Romer – “Luca,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Nerida Tyson-Chew – “H Is for Happiness,” “Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid”
Producers Mariela Besuievsky – “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” “The Secret in Their Eyes” Cale Boyter – “Dune,” “Pacific Rim Uprising” Chad Burris – “Collisions,” “Drunktown’s Finest” Damon D’Oliveira – “The Grizzlies,” “Love Come Down” Luc Déry – “Gabrielle,” “Monsieur Lazhar” Michael Downey – “Elvis Walks Home,” “Light Thereafter” Yaël Fogiel – “Memoir of War,” “Latest News of the Cosmos” Cristina Gallego – “Birds of Passage,” “Embrace of the Serpent” Laetitia Gonzales – “Plot 35,” “Tournée” Pauline Gygax – “With the Wind,” “My Life as a Zucchini” Margot Hand – “Passing,” “Brittany Runs a Marathon” Jojo Hui – “Better Days,” “Dearest” Eva Jakobsen – “Miss Viborg,” “Godless” Lucas Joaquin – “Mayday,” “Love Is Strange” Lizette Jonjic – “12 Dares,” “Guerrilla” Thanassis Karathanos – “The Man Who Sold His Skin,” “Tulpan” Kim McCraw – “Drunken Birds,” “Incendies” Sev Ohanian – “Run,” “Searching” Christina Piovesan – “The Nest,” “Amreeka” Natalie Qasabian – “Run,” “All about Nina” Philippe Rousselet – “CODA,” “Source Code” Sara Silveira – “Good Manners,” “Vazante” James Stark – “Prayers for the Stolen,” “Mystery Train” Riccardo Tozzi – “La Nostra Vita,” “Don’t Move” Shih-Ching Tsou – “Red Rocket,” “The Florida Project” Nadia Turincev – “The Insult,” The Boss’s Daughter” Tim White – “King Richard,” “Ingrid Goes West” Trevor White – “King Richard,” “LBJ” Teruhisa Yamamoto – “Drive My Car,” “Wife of a Spy” Olena Yershova – “Brighton 4th,” “Volcano”
Production
Design
François Audouy – “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” “Ford v Ferrari”
Laura Ballinger Gardner – “The Irishman,” “Joker”
Chris Baugh – “Steve Jobs,” “Argo”
Ellen Brill – “Being the Ricardos,” “Bombshell”
Joanna Bush – “La La Land,” “Life of Pi”
Christina Cecili – “Cyrano,” “A Quiet Place”
John Coven – “The Lion King,” “Logan”
Carol Flaisher – “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Miss Sloane”
Sandy Hamilton – “tick, tick…BOOM!,” “Joker”
Ellen Lampl – “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Jurassic World”
Enrico Latella – “Tenet,” “All the Money in the World”
Steven Lawrence – “Death on the Nile,” “Cinderella”
Melissa Levander – “The Tender Bar,” “The High Note”
Drew Petrotta – “The Suicide Squad,” “Captain Marvel”
Jean-Vincent Puzos – “Jungle Cruise,” “Amour”
Maya Shimoguchi – “Ford v Ferrari,” “Men in Black 3”
Short Films and Feature Animation Murad Abu Eisheh – “Tala’vision,” “Ta Hariri” Olivier Adam – “Sing 2,” “Minions” Michael Arias – “Harmony,” “Tekkonkinkreet” Evren Boisjoli – “Fauve,” “What Remains” Maria Brendle – “Ala Kachuu – Take and Run,” “The Stowaway” Sean Buckelew – “Drone,” “Hopkins & Delaney LLP” Olivier Calvert – “Bad Seeds,” “Animal Behaviour” Enrico Casarosa – “Luca,” “La Luna” Karla Castañeda – “La Noria (The Waterwheel),” “Jacinta” Hugo Covarrubias – “Bestia,” “The Night Upside Down” K.D. Dávila – “Please Hold,” “Emergency” Charlotte De La Gournerie – “Flee,” “Terra Incognita” Luc Desmarchelier – “The Bad Guys,” “Open Season” Anton Dyakov – “Boxballet,” “Vivat Musketeers!” Brian Falconer – “Saul & I,” “Boogaloo and Graham” Youssef Joe Haidar – “Scoob!,” “Animated American” Andy Harkness – “Vivo,” “Get a Horse!” Pierre Hébert – “Thunder River,” “Memories of War” Aneil Karia – “The Long Goodbye,” “Work” Brooke Keesling – “Meatclown,” “Boobie Girl” Nadine Lüchinger – “Ala Kachuu – Take and Run,” “Puppenspiel (Puppet Play)” Tadeusz Łysiak – “The Dress,” “Techno” Joe Mateo – “Blush,” “Big Hero 6” Sharon Maymon – “Skin,” “Summer Vacation” Kathleen McInnis – “Mama,” “Downturn” Yvett Merino – “Encanto,” “Wreck-It Ralph” Alberto Mielgo – “The Windshield Wiper,” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider- Verse” Les Mills – “Affairs of the Art,” “The Canterbury Tales” Jetzabel Moreno Hernández – “The Followers,” “Plums and Green Smoke” Dan Ojari – “Robin Robin,” “Slow Derek” Brian Pimental – “Tarzan,” “A Goofy Movie” Mikey Please – “Robin Robin,” “The Eagleman Stag” Erin Ramos – “Encanto,” “Frozen II” Mike Rianda – “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” Doug Roland – “Feeling Through,” “A Better Way” Leo Sanchez – “The Windshield Wiper,” “Over the Moon” Marc J. Scott – “The Boss Baby: Family Business,” “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” Sarah Smith – “Ron’s Gone Wrong,” “Arthur Christmas” Daniel Šuljić – “From Under Which Rock Did They Crawl Out,” “The Cake” Conrad Vernon – “The Addams Family,” “Shrek 2” Pamela Ziegenhagen-Shefland – “Abominable,” “The Emperor’s New Groove”
Sound Douglas Axtell – “True Grit,” “I Am Sam” Nerio Barberis – “Violeta al Fin,” “Find a Boyfriend for My Wife…Please!” Amanda Beggs – “The Forever Purge,” “Finding ’Ohana” Adrian Bell – “Mothering Sunday,” “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” Joshua Berger – “King Richard,” “The Lost City of Z” Paul (Salty) Brincat – “The Invisible Man,” “The Thin Red Line” Tom Yong-Jae Burns – “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” “Blade Runner 2049” Benjamin A. Burtt – “Dolittle,” “Black Panther” Simon Chase – “Belfast,” “Artemis Fowl” Brian Chumney – “West Side Story,” “The Croods: A New Age” Richard Flynn – “The Power of the Dog,” “Slow West” Albert Gasser – “Straight Outta Compton,” “Dances With Wolves” Lewis Goldstein – “In the Heights,” “Hereditary” Theo Green – “Dune,” “Blade Runner 2049” James Harrison – “No Time to Die,” “Captain Phillips” John Hayes – “The King’s Man,” “Tom and Jerry” Ruth Hernandez – “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” “Brooklyn’s Finest” Huang Zheng – “Better Days,” “Chongqing Hot Pot” Thomas Huhn – “The Wife,” “White God” David Husby – “Tomorrowland,” “Elf” Allison Jackson – “Don’t Think Twice,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Paul Ledford – “One Night in Miami,” “Logan” Leff Lefferts – “Vivo,” “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” Nancy MacLeod – “The Revenant,” “The Hunger Games” Charles Maynes – “After Earth,” “Letters from Iwo Jima” Alan Meyerson – “Dune,” “Inception” Casey Stone – “Frozen,” “Tsotsi” Edward Tise – “Into the Wild,” “Full Metal Jacket” Jana Vance – “Cast Away,” “Saving Private Ryan” Tara Webb – “The Power of the Dog,” “Mortal Kombat” Waldir Xavier – “From Afar,” “Central Station” Denise Yarde – “Belfast,” “Dumbo”
Visual Effects Ivy Agregan – “India Sweets and Spices,” “Wakefield” Geeta Basantani – “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Vivo” Aharon Bourland – “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” “Venom” Ivan Busquets – “Malignant,” “The Irishman” Joe Ceballos – “Skyscraper,” “Thor: Ragnarok” Richard Anthony Clegg – “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms,” “Blade Runner 2049” Mark Curtis – “Sully,” “Spectre” Markus Degen – “The King’s Man,” “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” Jack Edjourian – “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Tenet” Eric Enderton – “Shark Tale,” “Jurassic Park” Marcos Fajardo Orellana – “Thor,” “Monster House” Joel Green – “No Time to Die,” “The Kid Who Would Be King” Earl Hibbert – “The Fate of the Furious,” “Guardians of the Galaxy” Hayley Hubbard – “The Old Guard,” “Dumbo” Maia Kayser – “Rango,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” Garrett Lam – “Limbo,” “Shock Wave 2” Jake Maymudes – “Dune,” “Terminator: Dark Fate” Catherine Ann Mullan – “Dumbo,” “Maleficent” Charlie Noble – “No Time to Die,” “Wonder Woman 1984” J. Alan Scott – “Finch,” “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” Tefft Smith – “Alice through the Looking Glass,” “Tomorrowland” Alan Travis – “Black Widow,” “The Irishman” Michael Van Eps – “Deepwater Horizon,” “Poseidon” Sean Noel Walker – “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Black Widow” Vernon Wilbert – “Stealth,” “I, Robot” Eric Jay Wong – “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” “Lucy” Kevin Wooley – “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” “Jurassic World” Wei Zheng – “Mank,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Writers
Zach Baylin – “King Richard”
Henry Bean – “The Believer,” “Deep Cover”
Pawo Choyning Dorji* – “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom”
Michael Grais – “Cool World,” “Poltergeist”
Ted Griffin – “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Ravenous”
Ryusuke Hamaguchi* – “Drive My Car,” “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy”
Jeremy O Harris – “Zola”
Sian Harries Heder* – “CODA,” “Tallulah”
Mike Jones – “Luca,” “Soul”
Reema Kagti – “Gully Boy,” “Gold”
Adele Lim – “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Crazy Rich Asians”
Craig Mazin – “Identity Thief,” “The Hangover Part II”
Margaret Nagle – “With/In,” “The Good Lie”
Takamasa Oe – “Drive My Car,” “Beautiful Method”
Alex Ross Perry – “Her Smell,” “Listen Up Philip”
Adam Rifkin – “Giuseppe Makes a Movie,” “Small Soldiers”
Jordan Roberts – “Big Hero 6,” “3, 2, 1…Frankie Go Boom”
Katie Silberman – “Booksmart,” “Isn’t It Romantic”
Randi Mayem Singer – “Tooth Fairy,” “Mrs. Doubtfire”
Jon Spaihts – “Dune,” “Doctor Strange”
Małgorzata Szumowska – “Never Gonna Snow Again,” “Elles”
Mark A. Victor – “Cool World,” “Poltergeist”
Members-at-Large
Keith Adams
Josiah Akinyele
Richard Berger
Andrew Birch
Andrew Cannava
George Drakoulias
Andrew Dunlap
Erin Dusseault
James Farrell
Valerie Flueger Veras
Andy Fowler
Glenn Kiser
Anne Lai
Susan Lazarus
Joe Machota
Leonard Maltin
Deborah McIntosh
Julia Michels
Daniel Rabinow
Ilda Santiago
Danie Streisand
Matt Sullivan
Anne Lajla Utsi
Matt Vioral
Michael Zink
Originally launched under the stars in 2020 at the celebrated Queens Drive-In at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, MoMI’s Queens on Screen series comes home to the Redstone Theater for a monthly program spotlighting films set or filmed in our home borough of Queens, New York. From early silent films shot at Astoria’s legendary Paramount studios, whose history is entwined with this very Museum; to productions shot at various local studios that have proliferated in recent years; to films shot on the iconic streets, parks, waterways, airports, apartments, and storefronts of the borough—sometimes with Queens playing itself, sometimes disguised—to the Queens of the imagination, the borough is represented at a fanciful or dystopic slant in ways that only cinema is capable of. The series will also showcase films made by Queens-born and Queens-based artists, representing a diversity of form, subject, genre, maker, and era, all illustrating, exploring, and exemplifying the most diverse community in the world.
Entre Nos + Swerve
Friday, Jul 15 at 7:15 PM Sunday, Jul 17 at 1:30 PM Location: Bartos Screening Room
July 15: With filmmakers Paolo Javier and Lynne Sachs in
person
Dir. Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte. 2009, 81 mins. In
Spanish with English subtitles. With Paola Mendoza, Sebastian Villada, Laura
Montana Cortez, Anthony Chisholm. Newly arrived in New York City and deserted
by her husband, Mariana (Mendoza) must find a way to financially and
emotionally provide for her family in a strange city where she barely speaks
the language. Directed by and starring the extraordinary Mendoza, Entre
Nos is a tale of love, family, and a woman’s defiant pursuit of
stability, set and filmed in Queens and featuring remarkable visual texture by
Academy Award–nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Arrival).
Preceded by: Swerve
Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2022, 7 mins. With performances by
Emmy Catedral, Ray Ferriera, Jeff Preiss, Inney Prakash, and Juliana Sass. Five
New York City performers search for a meal at a market in Queens, New York,
while speaking in verse. Inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown
Boy poems, Swerve becomes an ars
poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the
liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / Free or discounted ($11) for MoMI members. Order online. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. Review safety protocols before your visit.
Eric Hynes (Curator of Film), Lynne Sachs, Paolo Javier, Emmy Catedral, Inney Prekash at Screening of Swerve at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Photo by Camila Galaz
Paolo Javier, Emmy Catedral, Lynne Sachs, Inney Prekash
While
visiting CRFIC2022, the American director spoke with “La Nación” about what it
meant to film her family for 30 years, the contradictions of the term
“non-fiction,” and her fascination with Julio Cortázar.
Rather than the feeling of being inside a
dream, Lynne Sachs’ cinematographic work feels like sneaking into another
person’s memory; making yourself small and tiptoeing into a room where a
cassette is playing memories of days gone by, of a past times that only years
later consecrate themselves into golden postcards.
Her last film, Film about a Father Who, condenses the emotions of Sachs’ own
family, whom she filmed for close to 30 years. While the recording of this project
never ceased, she produced many other films during this period (her prolific
career includes more than 30 films). Among them, a sentimental piece titled Con el pelo en el viento (Wind in Our Hair),
in which she explores the transition to adulthood, inspired in Julio
Cortázar short stories.
“To me, everything is about exploring and
challenging reality,” says the filmmaker, smiling and charismatic, on the third
floor of the Centro de Cine in Costa Rica, while one of her films is being projected
below. On this premise, the Memphis-born director conversed with “La Nación”
about how these two films have marked her life.
What
are your thoughts about the films selected for your retrospective at CRFIC?
Honestly, I feel honored that my films are
alongside Memoria, Drive My Car…
films that make me feel like I’m on a film adventure. I feel grateful on so
many levels to the Costa Rican community for giving me this space. I think the
film selection speaks to my interest in looking at reality’s textures.
About
your latest film, Film about a Father
Who, what was your primary interest?
It took me 30 years to make this film, so even
if I could tell you what my first interest was when I started, it definitely
changed and evolved. Let me tell you that this film is a testimony to the
belief that certain projects should not be made in a hurry, they should be gestated
like a baby, but making a film is more difficult than gestating a baby
(laughs). I have two daughters (laughs) but with a film you have to decide when
it’s ready. Regarding this film, I wanted to do it because I was intrigued by
my father and I loved that, at that moment, he was such an iconoclast; a
classic rule breaking person, who always created his own cosmos, but at the
same time had to deal with a lot of changes in our lives at that time, and the
film could give me that perspective.
I wanted to explore what it was like to be his
daughter and always having that door open for him. I couldn’t finish the film
because I didn’t know how to put all those things together. I felt I was ready
to film his life but not to confront all the footage afterwards. I made a lot
of movies while shooting this one, but this film was always breathing down my
neck.
When
did you feel it was the moment to stop?
A couple years before I stopped filming, I
realized that I wasn’t making a film about a father and daughter; it’s a film
about a family that makes you ask what is the soul of a family. What connects a
family? Blood? What happens when suddenly someone who seems like a “stranger” to
that family arrives? How do you deal with that? So I needed to listen to the
rest of my siblings to know and decide when the appropriate moment would be.
And to not only understand my father but also my
siblings and their experiences. My brother is gay, and there is a scene in the
film where you can see how alienated he is feeling. The rest of my siblings
have had other lives that also give a lot to think about.
The
people that I know that have seen your film loved it. Where do you think
resides the emotional component that achieves that?
Oh, thank you so much. I am moved to hear you
say that because my family thought that I was doing this for myself and not for
them. They saw that I only talked
about the movie and how I did things in order to have more profound
conversations, and at the end of the day the film was a ticket to having these
moments that I think all families want to have. Even my
mom said: “Will anyone be interested in this movie?” (laughs) and well, I told
her that most of us think our families are abnormal, that they’re weird. That
we want to be like other families because sometimes we feel ashamed of our own.
But this is natural and the film allows us to feel vulnerable about everything
that being part of a family entails. There is a catharsis there.
In the
end, how did you find the courage to confront all that footage?
It was very difficult. My initial fear was seeing
how old I had become (laughs), but I leaned on an ex-student of mine who worked
with me as an assistant. She helped me confront all that footage in the studio.
We wanted to open those boxes containing 30 year’s worth of material and decide
what to do with it, if we were going to digitize it or what other possibilities
there were. She gave me the courage to watch it all.
In one of the workshops I gave here in San
José, I told them how she helped me understand that I did not have to explain
my family tree, because the story is not about who is who but about emotions.
This helped so much: to determine that this is about emotions.
What is
the most exciting thing about filming nonfiction?
For me, the term “nonfiction” is complicated
because I like to think about how we see the world beyond a label. Fiction and
nonfiction are terms that make the world seem binary, when it isn’t. I know I
don’t do fiction but I prefer to say I work with reality, that I confront
reality because I give myself the opportunity to play with the people that
appear in front of the camera. I like to explore the real world, but I don’t
try to explain it. For me, if a
film is successful, it is because the public questions things about the world
that they had not questioned before.
Let’s
now see this from another perspective. In your film Con el pelo en el viento (Wind in Our Hair) you introduce yourself
to fiction. What brought you to make that film?
Oh, in that one reality is out of focus. In
2007 there was a retrospective in Argentina and I wanted to go back and make a
film there because I met so many talented people. I have two daughters and
wanted to find more girls to make this story about growing up. We knew we
wanted to reinterpret some of Julio Cortázar’s short stories, so we chose the
story El fin del juego (The end of the
game) which refers precisely
to that end of childhood and what comes after with your body, with your
sexuality and with your mind. I wanted to portray it,
thinking about my daughters and all the social changes that they might face. In
fact, I find it curious to watch this film now, because the girls in the film
are already 25 years old. It’s very sweet to see the passage of time like this.
The magnificent thing about making films is feeling connected to different
communities.
It’s a
very powerful story. Since we are talking about this, what do you think about
Julio Cortázar?
Well, I love him (laughs). I love how perceptive
he is and playful with language. Of course, there is the tremendous experiment
that he did with Rayuela (Hopscotch), a
book that is very liberating and has definitely inspired my filmmaking. But I’m
even more fascinated by his short stories, even though they seem more
traditional. For this film, I tried to portray that sensitivity of seeing girls
confronting a period of their life and wanting to deal with it.
I love the short story Casa Tomada (House Taken Over), a two-page text. In fact, the first
part of the film was inspired by that story, with that almost Cold War fear of
feeling being watched. I am thinking that now it feels so current with the
Alexas that live in our homes and listen to everything we say. Cortázar,
without a doubt, was a visionary because the girls actually feel that the walls
are listening, a very contemporary feeling.
Maybe a
Costa Rican book could inspire your next film…
I would love to! I’ve been given an anthology
that I am very excited to start reading and I definitely would like to learn
more. I love to explore traditions that can inspire my work.
At this
moment in your life, what is your main interest around making movies?
It has a lot to do with my next film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Cada contacto
deja un rastro). It is a feature film that is about expressing, using
forensics theory, how there is a footprint in everything we do, like criminals
who are chased using their traces. My film does not have anything to do with
crime but with how people whom we meet leave us with a perception for the rest
of our lives. Over many years, I’ve
collected thousands of contact cards. Most of their owners I never see again,
but they leave their fingerprints on those cards. It’s as if their trail
follows me forever.
It is an allegory for how I can reconnect and
reflect on what people leave to me after a lifetime. It is not the same as a
family relationship – their memories may stay with you for longer – but about
people you meet in stores, your first psychologist, a journalist, like you… It’s
a reflection that I’m very excited to explore.
Experimental
filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ latest outing, “Swerve,” begins with a shot of a street
in Queens, followed shortly by a voiceover spoken in Tagalog. As the next shot
features the famed Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst, the voiceover continues.
“‘Mi
Ultimo Adios‘, ayon kay Original Brown Boy” (“‘Mi Ultimo Adios’,
according to the Original Brown Boy”).
This nod to one
of the most famous poems written by Philippine national hero Jose Rizal before
his death makes sense. Rizal was, after all, lamenting the need for his
countrymen to learn from the past to see how to move forward. And Sachs’ source
for this film, Philippine-born poet Paolo Javier, yearns for those same tenets.
Based on the
words by Javier from his book “OBB” (acronym for ‘Original Brown Boy’);
“Swerve” sees filmmaker Lynne Sachs on a regular Tuesday directing this
7-minute short. Equal parts experimental, incisive, and introspective; the film
works as a quick examination of one’s identity—and how it stacks up to their
endless dreams.
In 2015, The New Yorker featured a profile on Paolo Javier, who
served as poet laureate of Queens from 2010 to 2014. It, however, prefaced the
profile with an interesting piece of information: More languages are spoken in
Queens than in any place of comparable size on earth.
This explains
“Swerve’s” unconventional structure. Then again, With Sachs behind the camera,
this should surprise no one. What’s interesting to note is the filmmaker’s
reaction upon reading Javier’s book for the first time. Sachs had stated that
she began hearing the lines in her head; some of the verses, she said, played
out with people walking through a food court full of distinct restaurant kiosks
and stalls. And to support The New Yorker’s observation, the Hong Kong Food
Court in Elmhurst has long served as a gathering spot for immigrant and working
class people from the neighborhood.
Javier, for his
part, knew that poetry is an artistic expression to be shared as a gift. He
himself believed that being a poet laureate does not involve any monetary
compensation at all; on the contrary, it’s a privilege for one to be able
impart poetry to others.
Sachs manages
to translate Javier’s attempt to deconstruct the modern Filipinx identity; and
through the latter’s words, the expressions of passion, ambition, and the
search for identity overflow.
In a world—all
the more compounded by the global pandemic—where people still repress their
self-expression for fear of ridicule, “Swerve” gets its message across loud and
clear. As it nears its end, the film exhorts the audience: “Give. Love. Want.
Fight.”
“Adore
your endless monologue.”
If that call to
action isn’t enough encouragement, then I don’t know what is.
Directed by Lynne Sachs, “Swerve” will have its world premiere on June 26th at BAMcinemaFest.
While Eden may
at first appear as an image book, to be devoured with the eyes with the freedom
of a journey without plan, engaging with the book in this way will cause you to
miss its immersive, linear construction of meaning. The pages of
images with occasional text are not numbered per se, but this is a book that,
like a film, moves forward in time. I started with Kenter’s introductory text,
one that claims that the art within the book was found, like flora in “wetlands
or between clover and lace umbrellas discarded”. The ambiguity of a
made object and a found object had begun. We will be asked to parse
a “ventriloquism of dots” in the next few pages, words that become images and
images that morph into words. Next, I discovered a series of
overlaid, Cubist-esque faces, confronting me directly and in profile. This
multiplicity of perspectives accentuates a human countenance that speaks to me,
even with closed lips. A ventriloquist for the author perhaps?
Turn page to
another face, this time in the darkness, like the moon’s face but in negative.
Here, I am already wondering what we find in any face. Aren’t they
all the same, really? Soon, a two-page combination that reminds me that we are
in what Kenter calls a “menagerie of planned and found” when I see collaged
images of educational treatises and abstracted line
drawings. Detritus or culture? It matters not. Immediately after,
nature reveals its own spontaneous culture, what appears to me as ephemeral
prints in the snow are here documented, and that is enough. Next, we say
goodbye to everything made, just observing the slightest crevice of light in
the dark — suggested by white on black, black on white, the optics give us such
liberty to see things as we want to see them.
Each pairing in
this book is critical. Together they create suggestions of trompe
l’oeil, make us play with what we think we should see and what we see at first
glance. I relish these shifts in perception. In a later image, a
slit of light, like a key hole becomes explicitly a little angel, not because I
saw this but because the words on the page told me. I am seeing with Kenter,
transporting abstraction into a spirit. This is what art can do, and I am
grateful for the guidance.
Soon, I see a
musically inspired page and another sense is sparked, I hear culture in my
mind, I am aware of the work of writing notes and having them read by a person
with an instrument. I am a musician without instruments, reading and
reproducing soundless sounds. What a journey I have taken, already.
What is left in my hands are a series of word/ image engagements that stretch
and expand upon the place of poetry in all frames of culture – signage,
information tech, children’s tales. If a book is a toy, here I hold
“six toys” and I will continue to play with them when and if I
wish. Now they are mine.
Starfish
Aorta Colossus
Film by Lynne Sachs,
Poem by Paolo Javier
“Poetry
watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the
digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the
celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film
journeys.”
Lynne Sachs. Filmmaker & Poet
Lynne Sachs is
an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York.
Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she
searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and
aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has
worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara
Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
Lynne has
produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and
web projects. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the
challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to
image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006,
when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia,
Israel/Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war —
where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her
own subjective perceptions.
Lynne is also
deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press
published her first book “Year by Year Poems”.
Lynne Sachs showed a rough cut of her latest film
“Swerve” to her mother, wanting to test out whether the meaning of words would
come out even if she didn’t understand all the language when a bit of Tagalog
is thrown into the mix of the mostly English-language short.
“I wanted her to think about them and allow
herself to play and to hear this phrase or that phrase and how it’s iterated,”
said Sachs, who teamed with the poet Paolo Javier on a film in which the rhythm
of the verses taken from his latest collection “O.B.B. aka The Original Brown
Boy” create an infectious energy that overtakes whatever strict definition they
have. In the heart of Queens at the HK Food Market where the food court may be
pan-Asian, but the cultural stew of customers is even more diverse, Sachs and
Javier make a meal out of zipping around table to table where a pandemic may
have kept some customers away, but as people begin feeling their way back into
the world, the sensations of reconnecting are conveyed in phrases that may come
across as nonsequiturs individually but coalesce into something greater as the
feeling behind intonations and delivery transcend the statements
themselves. Blurring the lines between what’s indoors and outdoors as the film
traverses the mall and the park just outside, “Swerve” elicits the interior
lives of its ensemble as they go about their daily lives but allow one to see
the beauty in making it another day.
With “Swerve” making its world premiere this
weekend at the BAMCinemaFest, Sachs and Javier graciously reteamed to talk
about emerging from the pandemic to shoot the eight-minute short and turning
verbal poetry into a cinematic language while making other choices about what
to translate and what not to.
How did
this come about?
Paolo
Javier: I’ve known Lynne for quite a while now and in terms
of the pandemic, time has been really altered forever right, so I’m hanging
onto all those seconds I’ve known Lynne and doubling the length. [laughs] I’m a
big admirer of hers and we just clicked as friends. Lynne also is a poet and
for this particular film, I had a book that was forthcoming and I asked Lynne
if she would like to collaborate on something to occasion the release of the
book. It could be really any form that she wants to take. I didn’t expect it
being the film that Lynne ended up making, and I say this with awe and
astonishment and just deep humility because I’m just over the moon. Every time
I watch “Swerve,” I get something new from it. But [initially it was] the idea
of doing something low-key and not necessarily elaborate, and collaborations
take a life of their own.
Lynne
Sachs: I just adore the way that Paolo puts words
together, and the way that he listens in a parallel fashion to a documentary
maker because you’re always soaking up the world, but as an experimental
filmmaker, you listen to the world, and in this case, you observe with your
ears, but then you allow yourself to rearrange the words to become more aware
of their meaning outside or beyond or even within reality. One of the things
that I wanted to do with this film was to examine what it meant to write poetry
within a pandemic and specifically in a place that was a vortex of some of the
worst hit communities, at least in the United States. That was Elmhurst,
Queens, which that market you saw [in the film] was much more thriving than it
is now before the pandemic. And in that community, there were so many
languages, I started to think about, “Okay, you have Spanish, you have Chinese,
you have Tagalog — so many different ways that different communities
communicate and then you have poetry. [So I wondered] Can poetry be a language?
Why does poetry always have to be part of a remove from the quotidian? And my
goal was to make poetry quotidian, not just available or accessible or
understandable, but more like let’s celebrate all the languages and then
there’s this one which is Paolo Javier’s poetry language – it’s not just any
poetry, but it’s his poetry. So I said could people speak in Javier?
Lynne,
were you free at first to take Paolo’s words and run with them in terms of
finding corresponding images or did you work together on that?
Lynne Sachs: I would say the images were my idea and I
decided to do it in the Hong Kong Food Market, mostly because [Paolo]
introduced me to it. Paolo was, for four years, the Queens poet laureate, so he
got to know all the restaurants and he knows everyone. Food is a big part of
our family’s relationship. We eat meals together, so it has to be about food,
but not just look at these pretty plates and take pictures. It has to be
eating. And we were supposed to shoot the whole film in that market, but then
something called the Delta Variant came in and we almost canceled the whole
thing. [The shoot] was pretty challenging to coordinate, and I’m actually glad
that we have the masks in it because it’s more about now. We didn’t have to
fake it.
For
Paolo, I’m guessing the words were locked in, but was the meaning of them
changing as this unfolded?
Paolo
Javier: Yeah, I was hoping for the language to take a life
of its own, especially as it’s spoken, uttered, performed by our individual
actors, and one of the great experiences I have of watching “Swerve” is how
much of a Lynne Sachs film it is. I really feel like I’m just a bit part in it,
that it’s my poems that are being performed, but it’s its own thing and that’s
what you hope for. The language that’s uttered by the actors, they’re
performing sonnets — Shakespearean sonnets for that matter, so you have this
tension between old form, but it’s not these are rhyming poems and the syntax
is not really syntax, it’s more like parataxes where the word order is really
slippery. There’s a lot of slippage just within the lines. So what I was really
hoping was that the actors were not terrified by this poetry and they could
really make it their own. Because it’s Lynne Sachs directing this, I think they
knew what they were signing onto and made it their own within the space of HK
Food Court in Elmhurst and also the space that Lynne gave them.
Lynne
Sachs: Actually, Paolo, there’s a little bit of Tagalog in
the film. What does that mean to you?
Paolo
Javier: Well, this is actually something we discussed. Do
we translate the Tagalog that appears in the film? I’m all for having captions,
just for accessibility, but then this became an aesthetic consideration of do
we include a translation of Tagalog. Lynne made the call to not translate it
and as a sound poet, I have to respect that. Language is an aural experience,
but [especially] pre-Hispanic, Filipino poetry is an aural experience, so to
hear Tagalog spoken and experienced as a sound in a film that really asks you
to open up your experience of language and poetry, I feel was a really daring
decision, and aesthetically, it just makes sense. Legibility is always
something that artists think about, some more than others, but this film came
about in anticipation of a launch of a book of mine, an experimental comics
book and the aim of the book when I was making it was to really blur the lines
between poetry and comics, so I really feel that decision of not having Tagalog
be translated is Lynne really taking the next step in terms of making a
cinepoem, [where] it’s not a film striving to illustrate a poem.
Lynne
Sachs: I did want to extract certain words and phrases and
put them on screen. That was fun.
Paolo
Javier: And Lynne shared several edits of this film and the
decision to translate or not translate Tagalog comes out of the various edits
that Lynne was making. This is what I love about cinema is just how hands on
and how tactile all the elements are and that’s the kind of poet that I am with
language. Lynne shared with me several versions of this film and asked what my
opinion was and she was very generous to include me.
Lynne Sachs: Very
precise notes. Very good notes.
You
mentioned this quotidian idea of poetry before and in a literal sense, there’s
a flow to the visual language, but you keep it grounded. What was it like to
figure out?
Lynne Sachs: Maybe I can talk a little bit about the actors because this text is pretty intimidating and there’s an old fashioned term in theater like oh you have to memorize your lines. This text is pretty intimidating — and only one person in the group really was capable of it — but I really liked their awkwardness [generally]. I like that they don’t own it and one guy who wrote it on his hands and you wouldn’t even see it, one wrote it on his mask. You would say it was on book [in film parlance], but also we are talking about something that comes from a book, so we want to say this is about reading. Paolo actually used a term when we were talking the film, “Ars Poetica” cinematically because it tells you about the ways that cinema or poetry picks up on how we conduct our lives, but then we’re given permission to rework it and throw it into a soup that doesn’t have a recipe. I really thought that was similar.
How did
you end up with your ensemble?
Lynne
Sachs: I’ll start with Inney Prakash — Paolo and I met
Inney for the first time on Zoom in May of 2020 and we were supposed to teach a
film and poetry workshop at Maysles Documentary Center and then the pandemic
happened. And what’s incredible is [Inney] had just moved to New York and to
have such a major impact on this city is amazing, so I had met him there and
then he did his [virtual] film festival, Prismatic Ground, and when I saw him
in the little box [on screen] when he was being a host, I thought he had a nice
charisma and presence, so I asked him if he wanted to be in the film. I didn’t
know that Inney is a professional actor basically — it’s not his main
interest or commitment, but he’s been in theater and some film, so he came
totally prepared. And Juliana Sass is someone I’ve known since she was a little
baby and I think she’s a great actor. I always wanted to have her in a film and
her mom is a good friend of mine, so I asked her to be in it and then I knew
Jeff Preiss, a renowned filmmaker and a big supporter of independent film. He shot
“Let’s Get Lost,” which was a classic on the ‘80s on Chet Baker, so I’ve
admired lots of his work, but I almost could’ve guessed that he never did
anything in front of the camera and out of the blue Paolo asked me if I
happened to know Jeff…
Paolo
Javier: Because during the pandemic, I was working at a
different job as a curator and program director working from home remotely and
while I’d assemble my programs, I’d just watch what films of Jeff Preiss I
could just find online. At one point, I just kept rewatching his video of the
REM song “Near Wild Heaven” and snippets of “Let’s Get Lost” and whatever I
could find and I always have music or cinema on to sustain me, so I don’t get
stuck. And when it came time to cast, I just asked Lynne, “do you know Jeff?”
And I never would’ve imagined or even ever dared to ask Jeff [to be in the
film], so that was Lynne’s idea.
Lynne
Sachs: [Paolo] just wanted to know, “Do you know Jeff
Preiss?” And [Jeff] burst out laughing when I asked him to do it. But I liked
that. That’s one of the interesting things that happens in New York is that
people wear different hats and you can be fluidly part of someone’s community
and if you’re not very good at playing the piano, but a little good, then you
can do it in the way that you don’t know it, but you’re into doing it.
Paolo Javier: Yeah, I never once doubted that Lynne would just engage all the performers in a meaningful way, just because I’ve seen what she’s done in her previous films. “Your Days, My Night” is one of my all-time favorite films, period and for Lynne to have assembled a crew and direct all of those performances in that film, [I thought] this film is a piece of cake. [laughs] And the other performers, Emmey Catedral and ray ferriera are from Queens and they’re both familiar with the park that is the other location of this film, so it was really important to include both in this film for that fact that they’re locals and this is a space that they frequented, but also they’re artists. They’re both good friends of mine who I participated in the Queens Biennial with in 2018, and there’s so much in the DNA of this film that’s in the DNA of other aspects of the location, so it’s really great that both said yes.
When
this was filmed in the summer of 2021, what was it like getting together for a
film as you’re coming out of quarantine?
Lynne
Sachs: That’s probably the most important question of all,
really, at that moment in all of our lives. As the director, it was a major
responsibility and I was a little scared for myself to be in this group
dynamic, but I was even more scared because I was asking people to do something
that could’ve compromised them. I was scared because I didn’t want to put
anybody in a situation where they would either feel pressured or nervous or
that they might get COVID, so some of them were willing to not wear the mask
indoors and we were super strict.
Paolo Javier: Yeah, we had these deliberations several times and when Lynne made the call to do it, [she] had made an earlier call to pause it, and then said, “No, let’s just do it.” And following through was contingent on how we all felt when everybody gathered. It’s when we all got together and we were all outside of the space and just checked in to see how we were all feeling. That was empowering for me [because] you always take a risk, and it’s a legitimate consideration and a concern, but I trusted Lynne and I trusted everybody [else].
Lynne
Sachs: We gave everybody a low pressure option not to show
up.
Paolo
Javier: Yes, that was really important. But they all showed
up and I think they were excited and the shoot started off rainy and grey and
drizzly and then the sun came out later in the afternoon and the community was
out and it’s just beautiful, what Lynne was able to capture.
Lynne
Sachs: One of my favorite moments was the end of the day
we were in this playground park and all of a sudden all these middle-aged Filipino
men show up and they all had prepared food and they put out this big spread…
Paolo
Javier: Yeah, it was a picnic. They had pancit and lumpia
and they meet there every Sunday.
Lynne
Sachs: And then they offered the food to everyone in our
production. That’s like 12 people.
Paolo
Javier: They had enough and then some! [laughs]
