Tag Archives: featured

Avery Willard

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

Cadillac

“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

Mario Casas in UNIT 7

“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

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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

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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 Water​Uncategorized

Our Man In Tribeca: A Fish Out of Water at the TFF by

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.

Gay New York

Dear Biddy by

JimBidgood

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…

News & Updates​The Movie

Keep The Lights On Is Coming Home! by

KEEP_THE_LIGHTS_ON_Thure_Lindhardt_Zachary_Booth_byJean-Christophe-Husson

Terrific news! The Tribeca Film Festival announced today that Keep The Lights On will have its official New York premiere in the fest’s exciting Spotlight program. After thrilling screenings at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale, Ira Sachs’ Teddy award-winning new film about a troubled relationship will finally be screened in the city where it takes place! The Tribeca Film Festival takes place from April 18 – 29th. And on the other side of the world – if you happen to be in Hong Kong, KTLO will screen at the Hong Kong International Film Festival on March 25th, and April 8th. More festival screenings to be announced soon, so keep checking back!

Gay New York

The Closing Doors by

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I’ve maintained for years that there’s no greater misery for the average New Yorker than getting to the subway platform, racing down as you hear the train coming, and arriving on the platform to see the doors shutting just as you approach. Neil Goldberg shares my fascination with this particular moment, having secretly photographed many people at the exact moment they realized they would not be getting to their destination on time. Last week at the Museum of the City of New York, “Stories the City Tells Itself”, a show of Goldberg’s work opened, including the subway platform photographs, and other works documenting the mundane and everyday sights familiar to anyone who’s lived in New York. Goldberg’s work is also featured in Keep The Lights On, a film also to a large extent about the rhythms of daily life in New York City. The show runs through May 28th, so if you don’t make the subway in time, don’t fret.

Gay New York

Hawk Kinkaid and HookOnline.org by

HawkKinkaid_by Ilenia Martini_L12

Hawk Kinkaid is speaking to me between meetings. His answers are quick and precise, and after about fifteen minutes, he tells me he has to go. It’s understandable of course. His current job is not what he’s best known for. Hawk Kinkaid is the name he used when he was working in the sex industry, and it’s the name he uses in his role as the creator of HookOnline.org, a website devoted to harm reduction and fostering dialogue between male sex workers, and Rent U, a teaching program he created as an off-shoot of Hook. I’m speaking to Kinkaid because of an event he’s hosting tonight (2/24) –a fundraiser and book launch party for In the Company of Men: Inside the Lives of Male Prostitutes, a book by Dr. Christian Grov and Dr. Michael D. Smith. Here’s our conversation.

Adam: How did you first get the idea to do Hook Online?
Hawk: I started the project over a decade ago, and the initial reason for starting it was that there were no resources for men in the industry to assist in the learning curve, in other words, the site serves to help keep people from making some of the more common mistakes that people make in the industry. It’s also a way to foster some conversation about the business so that we are helping people to understand it better. A lot of people, especially gay men who are working in the industry will take a kind of laissez faire approach. They think having sex and having sex for money is not very complicated, but there are effects and decisions you have to make when you work in the industry. Many people have made many mistakes in doing that. So what we try and do is give people an opportunity to better understand it when making that decision. We are a harm reduction program. Our goal is not to prevent people from being in the industry, and a lot of the people who work on the project are people who do very well in the business. They pay their taxes, they pay for their healthcare, they make all sorts of practical decisions. But many people don’t. They’re in the industry very temporarily, as a result of a bad situation or emergency or they just see an opportunity for a period of time so they take it on. So what we want to do is get them to think practically and occupationally about the decision they make.

What are some of the most common complications people face in the industry?
On a professional level there are always issues surrounding physical violence, drug and alcohol usage, especially when they’re working and people end up being taken advantage of that way. There’s also implications in their personal lives, in their friends and their support system. As far as social behaviors, as I mentioned, there’s often significant drug and alcohol usage in their free time – which can become an addiction. More…