Every night this July, Dirty Looks: On Location will install a film and video work in queer social settings (like gay bars or community centers) or former sites of queer sociality (shuttered baths, bars, or sex clubs). An extension of the essential queer experimental screening series curated by Bradford Nordeen, On Location looks to bring the general public in contact with historically important queer artwork, and the history of queer New York.
IN SEARCH OF AVERY WILLARD HITS FESTIVALS THIS SUMMER: WE NEED YOUR HELP! by
Exciting news!! IN SEARCH OF AVERY WILLARD has officially wrapped post-production and will begin touring festivals this summer! Produced concurrently and in partnership with KEEP THE LIGHTS ON, this companion documentary short chronicles the life and work of one of queer art’s most fascinating and elusive innovators.
We are proud to announce that IN SEARCH OF AVERY WILLARD will have it’s official world premiere at the 2012 New Jersey International Film Festival! The festival will take place from June 1-17, and ISOAW will premiere on Sunday, June 10th at 7:00pm in Vorhees Hall on the Rutgers University campus. For details and ticket information, click HERE.
Many more exciting festival announcements are on the way, and we are so grateful to have the opportunity to finally share this film with the world. However, in order to do so, WE NEED YOUR HELP!
We’re in the homestretch, but this final leg – the distribution phase – requires funding for travel and exhibition materials that exceeds our micro production budget. Today marks the launch of our 30-day Kickstarter campaign to raise the necessary funds for our festival tour. We are asking YOU to help IN SEARCH OF AVERY WILLARD reach audiences around the world by making a donation. As a token of our gratitude, we are offering a variety of unique rewards for contributors.
Watch our Kickstarter video above and CLICK HERE TO MAKE A DONATION!
Please help us spread the word by re-posting the campaign link on social media and sharing with family and friends. On behalf of the entire ISOAW team, thank you in advance for your generosity and support!
Cary Kehayan
Director, In Search of Avery Willard
Our Man in Tribeca: A Fish Out Of Water
TFF 2012: Furious by
“Capitalism is not natural, it’s just brainwashed into us,” Antonino D’Ambrosio director and producer of Let Fury Have The Hour, a documentary of art as a political statement, as a “creative response,” tells me in the foyer of Tribeca’s Cadillac Lounge. “Dialogue is the beginning of change,” Antonino says as he turns to his publicist, who brings him a vegetarian sandwich.
In his first feature documentary, Antonino goes back thirty years to the cultural resistance of the 80’s, “when America changed forever.” He features dozens of mavericks of thought, science, and humor: artists, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, and futurists, including semi-legends like Wayne Kramer and John Sayles, and a string of brilliant left-wing counter-culture charming-motherfuckers. During quick interviews, they leave very little unchallenged: From our collective apathy, to our acceptance of hierarchy in politics, to capitalism and religion, all the way to the top – “How can there be God? God struck Haiti when there is Las Vegas?” More…
Our Man in Tribeca: A Fish Out Of Water
TFF 2012: Dinner with Unit 7 at the Chelsea Hotel by
“In 1992, Spain went to her Baile de Debutante. Our country was presented to the global scene,” Alberto Rodriguez the director of Unit 7 tells me over beer and appetizers at the Chelsea Hotel. The film is about a group of cops who break all the rules to clean up Spain’s ghettos in the 80’s. Bearded, in a dark navy coat, he has a seaman’s wrinkles from time in the wind and sun, the way directors in Southern Europe should look. His English is potentially adequate, but the translator steps in. “Drug trafficking areas in major cities were supposed to be eradicated for the ’92 Olympics. They were not aided or rehabilitated. They had to disappear!” Alberto curves his hand hyperbolically. More…
Our Man in Tribeca: A Fish Out Of Water
TFF 2012: To Live And Die For Globalization by
I saw press crying at Tribeca’s pre-festival screenings. Actually, I heard them sobbing in the dark. Old-timers here told me it rarely happens. If ever. “Never.” So why was I so “lucky?”
Maybe it’s the recession, but man’s isolation in his fight against the “machine” is at the festival’s core. “When you’re cut off from social network you get lonely and die,” an artist explains in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s breathtaking Let Fury Have The Hour. But before death, Tribeca shows how haunted we are. A rallying cry of a fight we can’t resist. My first week here I felt depressed and encouraged all at once. More…
Our Man in Tribeca: A Fish Out Of Water
Tribeca Film Festival: The Importance of Being Silent by
This is the first dispatch from “Our Man in Tribeca” Ioannis Pappos, who is covering the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival (April 18-29).
In part, we owe the Tribeca Film Festival to Al Qaeda. After the 9/11 attacks, Robert De Niro co-founded the festival to raise the spirit and economy of Lower Manhattan. Ten years and five thousand screenings later, the festival’s Doha Tribeca spin-off is well established in Qatar. De Niro’s way of teaching fanatics a lesson in their own backyard? Or just another convenient symbiosis between super-rich Arabs and independent filmmakers?
I took my first stroll through Tribeca in the spring of 1993, soon after I moved to New York. I recall the neighborhood’s architecture resembling the trendy, then-gallery-packed Soho: the same textile cast-iron buildings. But the similarities stopped here. Once you crossed Canal Street, you relaxed. Tribeca was the quieter, less viable downtown. The conversion of buildings into condos had already begun, but the blocks retained an 80’s undiscovered artists-lofts feel. A sort of no-man’s land, where alienated walkers disappeared. Night-lights were few and far between. People went to Odeon, a restaurant as noir as its neighborhood, and to De Niro’s Tribeca Bar and Grill, a space as elusive as its famous owner, an actor notorious for his privacy. After two decades of hyper-invasive journalism, we still know very little about De Niro’s personal life. More…
Our Man in Tribeca: A Fish Out Of WaterUncategorized
Our Man In Tribeca: A Fish Out of Water at the TFF by
![pappos4[8]](http://keepthelightsonfilm.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/pappos481-750x1124.jpg "pappos4[8]")
A film festival is really nothing more than a community gathering, a selective, economically defined, cultural experience that in many ways is just as sociologically constructed as the neighborhood bar, or the set of people assembled on the A train, or a group of friends gathered at the Piers. The New York Film Festival looks very much like one neighborhood, one anthropologically gathered group of humans; Rooftop Films‘ summer film series another; MIX NYC a third, Human Rights Watch a very different other.
For this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Keep the Lights On has asked writer and man-about-town Ioannis Pappos — himself a fish out of water from Pelio, Greece — to keep his own eye on the goings ons at Tribeca from a very human perspective. What’s going on here, during these 10 days in April? Which New York do we see here? In a continuation of the sites interest in understanding New York as an organism made up of stories, join us for the next few two weeks as we see the Tribeca Film Festival through the eyes of one astute outsider.
Dear Biddy by
Biddy B – Mr. James Bidgood’s advice columnist friend, is back, just in time for spring, with some corrections to her last column and a rollicking story about bumps and grinds that ultimately results in the discovery of a long lost piece of artwork! It’s wild and strange, but very entertaining, as usual! – ed.
First off allow me to apologize for the misspelling of Mrs. Blatourbotum’s name in my column of last month. Her brief disappearance necessitated my hiring a temporary amanuensis, a Miss Harriet Johnsons. I assumed when she gave no explanation for this plurality perhaps she merely entertained a preference for more than the one Johnson. Indulge me now whilst I momentarily play the punster but she hardly seemed the type to be a typist.
Neither she nor does any other person have the least notion why for a second career she selected desk duty after forty two years performing as an ecdysiast, a profession she was made to abandon due to injury incurred trying to keep up with the tsunami of competitors amongst those currently popular female vocalists.
As the story goes, she was exhibiting her talents at a neighborhood firehouse one weekend and whilst executing a grind and bump, having completed the hip rotating portion, she thrust her abdomen out and upward so aggressively, her contracted gluteus minimus, medius and maximus became stuck and soon after fossilized. More…
Jared Buckhiester in 1991 by
This week in Art and Autobiography, we’re beginning a new feature, asking some of our favorite visual artists to explore the autobiographical nature of their work. First up, New York-based artist Jared Buckhiester, whose drawings and sculptures often recall faded snapshots of awkward teenage moments.
My sculpture “Jared Buckhiester in 1991” was actually made in 2008. At that time, like in my earlier drawings, I was definitely in a place of needing to work things out from my personal history, needing to rewrite it or simply rethink it. For a long time I collected yearbooks from high schools and middle schools I did not go to. They provide an opening for me to an experience that is shared in almost every American, and most human. I could look at the pictures in them for hours. In relation to my work I usually find myself hunting for photographs of the kids that seemed what I would call “unchosen”, not necessarily queer but the ones that interested me most usually seemed to be. More…
Music Box Films Acquires KEEP THE LIGHTS ON!! by
New York, NY (March 12, 2012) – Music Box Films announced today that the company is acquiring all North American rights to KEEP THE LIGHTS ON, the latest film from Ira Sachs. The film premiered to critical acclaim at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Subsequently, at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, it received the Teddy Award, the prize for the best film with an LGBT theme.
In his autobiographically inspired, fictional relationship drama KEEP THE LIGHTS ON, filmmaker – and recipient of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in 2005 for his film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE – Ira Sachs chronicles the emotionally and sexually charged journey through the love, addiction, and friendship of two men (portrayed by Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth). The film was produced by Sachs, Marie Therese Guirgis, and Lucas Joaquin, and the stellar supporting cast includes Julianne Nicholson (HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), Souléymane Sy Savané (GOODBYE SOLO) and Paprika Steen (APPLAUSE). The film will screen at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival next month.
Written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, KEEP THE LIGHTS ON is an honest, unflinching portrait of a relationship between two men in New York City. Despite meeting through a casual sexual encounter, documentary filmmaker Erik (Lindhardt) and closeted lawyer Paul (Booth) find a deeper connection and become bonded in an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows and dysfunctional patterns. Through it all, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity and to be true to himself.
Ed Arentz, Managing Director of Music Box Films, said: “We’ve been fans of Ira Sachs since THE DELTA so its a special treat to be able to present his latest film. Ira gets the big, little and difficult things right in KEEP THE LIGHTS ON: the thrill and evanescence of desire, the endurance of love, the unknowableness of others and the sense of time going by. His homage to legendary New York photographer and filmmaker James Bidgood is an added bonus.”
Noted Sachs: “Music Box has proven itself in a few short years to be a cutting edge distributor with a sophisticated understanding of both the market and cinema. Ed and Bill have a keen eye for films that have a potential to breakout from the independent landscape, and I’m excited by their ambition and excitement for Keep the Lights On.”
The deal for the film was negotiated by Marie Therese Guirgis (Producer of Keep the Lights On) and Kevin Iwashina (Preferred Content), with William Schopf, president of Music Box Films.