ON AND OFF CAMPUS: BARDIANS ON SCREEN

BARDIANS ON SCREEN

First Cow, photo by Allyson Riggs, courtesy of A24

The best movie of 2020, according to Time magazine, the Associated Press, and the New York Film Critics Circle (and no small number of Bardians), is S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow. This extraordinary and deeply layered work of art—it’s a buddy film/critique of capitalism/Western/culinary appreciation/portrait of class struggle/story of the American dream/love letter to nature—appears on more than 200 top-10 lists. In February, Reichardt received Rotterdam International Film Festival’s Robby Müller award, which honors a director of photography, filmmaker, or visual artist who “has created an authentic, credible, and emotionally striking visual language.” This summer, she began filming Showing Up, a portrait of an artist whose chaotic life, as she prepares for a career-changing show, becomes the inspiration for her art.

The Inheritance, photo courtesy of Grasshopper Films

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, and recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, premiered his debut feature film, The Inheritance, at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and it also screened at the New York Film Festival. Asili wrote, produced, directed, shot, and edited the movie, which is based on his time in a West Philadelphia Black radical collective. He says he was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, which Asili first saw as an MFA student at Bard. “I was floored,” he told Artforum. “It reminded me of my days living in a collective, but at the same time seemed to be coming from a totally different place in terms of class and culture. I knew I wanted to make what in reggae music would be called a version, or in hip-hop a remix, of La Chinoise, a critique and an homage at the same time.”

In addition to Asili, the diverse group of artists, writers, scholars, and scientists who make up the 184 Guggenheim Fellows for 2021 include filmmaker Irene Lusztig MFA ’06, MFA film and video faculty A. K. Burns MFA ’10, interdisciplinary multimedia artist Luba Drozd MFA ’15, and MFA writing faculty Roberto Tejada. Guggenheim Fellowships are grants to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.

Photo courtesy of Son of Monarchs

Son of Monarchs, a new film by French-Venezuelan biologist and filmmaker Alexis Gambis ’03, won Sundance’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which recognizes portrayals of science in film. Gambis uses monarch butterflies—their migration as well as their metamorphosis—as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in this semi-autobiographical film. Scientific American called it “stunningly photographed” and explained that the story “draws on CRISPR-Cas9- mediated genome research into the iconic butterflies to step into a narrative about hybrid identities, diminishing spaces, social evolution and divided territories.” Gambis says the film goes “from the vein of a butterfly wing to the border between countries.”

Rebeca Huntt ’12, photo by Christian DeFonte ’12

Filmmaker Rebeca Huntt ’12 was among five recipients of the inaugural Sustainable Artist Grant awarded by Brown Girls Doc Mafia in support of women and nonbinary people of color working in documentary film. Huntt, whose feature film Beba (produced by Sofia Geld ’12) had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto Film Festival, receives $10,000, mentorship from a network of business and craft consultants, and access to industry connections. She is also an archivist for documentaries produced by Hulu, PBS, and The Fader.

Directed by Ian Samuels ’06, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is a sweet coming-of-age love story with a timeloop, science-fiction overlay. For Mark, every day is a do-over. Until he notices Margaret, who, it turns out, is also caught in the same temporal anomaly. The teenagers decide to document the good things they witness, those “tiny perfect things” of the title. To find out how—or if— they get their never-ending day to tick over, you can stream the film on Amazon Prime Video.

Blanca Lista ’01 won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program as coexecutive producer on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (Netflix). She is at work on Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion animated musical version of Pinocchio and The Portable Door, a comic fantasy adapted from the Tom Holt novel of the same name.

Buddy Enright ’84 was executive producer of the mockumentary Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Amazon Prime), which won three Golden Globe Awards. Additionally, Enright earned an Emmy nomination in the Best Comedy Series category as a producer on Dead to Me (Netflix).

Produced by Olmo Schnabel ’17, with Executive Producer Thorvald Spartan Daggenhurst ’16, Giants Being Lonely is set in semirural Hillsborough, North Carolina, and stars Lily Gavin ’17 as a high-school beauty from a seemingly perfect home. Her life becomes entwined with those of the motherless star pitcher on the high school team, whose alcoholic father is loving but aloof, and the coach’s son, whose abusive father and emotionally distant mother are likewise of little help navigating the bumpy road toward adulthood. After screenings at the Venice and Santa Barbara Film Festivals, the film began streaming on demand in the United States in April.

Andrew Garfield as Link and Maya Hawke as Frankie in Mainstream by Gia Coppola ’09 photo courtesy of IFC Films

Mainstream, the new film directed and cowritten by Gia Coppola ’09, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 5, 2020, and was released May 7, 2021, by IFC Films. In it Coppola tells “a story about social media and its nefarious effects on the human psyche.”

Adam Khalil ’11 and Bayley Sweitzer ’12 won a 2021 Creative Capital Award for their collaboration Nosferasta, a vampire film and series of installations that tells the story of Oba, a Rastafarian vampire, and Christopher Columbus, Oba’s original biter, as they spread the colonial infection throughout the “new” world. Khalil, a member of the Ojibway tribe, is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, who subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Sweitzer is a filmmaker whose practice revolves around an ongoing attempt to repurpose the narrative film form in order to convey radical political possibilities.

Martine Syms MFA ’18 also was awarded a 2021 Creative Capital Award for her feature-length film Dumb World, which explores how athleticism, race, and fame congeal around the violent ideologies embedded within the objects of technology with which we are most intimately connected. Using a combination of video, installation, and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. These were among the 35 projects by 42 artists, chosen from nearly 4,000 entries, to receive up to $50,000 in project funding as well as additional career development services. Creative Capital was formed in 1999, in response to the National Endowment for the Arts’ termination of the majority of its grant programs for individual artists, as a way to support innovative, forward-thinking, and boundary-blurring artists.

Margot Robbie in Dreamland, 2019, directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte ’14, photo Automatik Entertainment/Alamy Stock Photo

Dreamland, directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte ’14, with Lola Kirke ’12 as the narrator, is a Dust Bowl period piece set in the 1930s. The film was completed before the pandemic hit, but feels as if it could have been made in response to it. Margot Robbie, who stars in Dreamland, has tapped Joris-Peyrafitte to direct her Tank Girl movie, though that has been delayed by COVID. Kirke, for her part, can be seen in Lost Girls, in which she plays Kim, a relative of a missing sex worker, who is a sex worker herself. Kirke also stars alongside Ben Platt in Broken Diamonds, which premiered at the 2021 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.