BREAKFAST WITH CURTIS

Presented by Beguiled Cinema
Laura Colella and cast members via Skype!

curtis

Saturday, August 9th at 8:00 pm, $7 -10

“I absolutely love it! You’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a smile from beginning to end.” –Paul Thomas Anderson

The micro-budgeted comedy Breakfast With Curtis was shot almost entirely in the homes of writer-director Laura Colella and her neighbors. Yet this is no ordinary home movie–it’s a coming-of-age story, family portrait, and stoner comedy all rolled into one. The title character is an introverted 14-year-old boy who overcomes his social anxiety during a “seminal summer” when he befriends the lovable eccentrics who live next door. His adventure begins when chief eccentric Syd asks him to shoot and edit a web series called “Breakfast With Syd,” in which the reclusive artist reflects on his life in the cultural underground and anything else that pops into his head. In making the series, Curtis becomes part of Syd’s little commune, which includes his wife, his artist roommates, and his kooky old landlady, Sadie. Eventually Curtis’s parents–who had fallen out with the neighbors five years earlier–learn to lighten up and follow suit.

Colella, who studied film at Harvard under the great Raul Ruiz, employs graceful tracking shots, screwball-style comic dialogue, and dreamy, laid-back pacing to advance a wholly cinematic style all her own. The film inspires a sense of wonder that’s all the more impressive given the seemingly limited setting. Such is the achievement of Breakfast With Curtis: it encourages us to find life-changing experiences where we rarely think to look.

Breakfast With Curtis is Laura Colella’s third feature as writer/director/editor. Laura’s films have screened at over 100 festivals, winning over 25 awards. She studied film as an undergraduate at Harvard, and is represented by United Talent Agency and Circle of Confusion. She also writes and directs plays, teaches Directing, Screenwriting and Filmmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and Vermont College of Fine Arts, collaborates on multimedia productions with Everett Company, and freelances in screenwriting, cinematography, and editing.

Programmed by Ben and Kat Sachs for Beguiled Cinema.
Filed under: artist in attendance, experimental, video

ELEGY TO CONNIE

Animated Documentary by Sarah Paulsen

Women in women

 Saturday, July 19th at 8:00 pm, $7-10

On February 7th, 2008, in Kirkwood, Missouri, an affluent suburb of St. Louis, Lee “Cookie” Thornton opened fire in a city meeting killing five people, among them councilwoman Connie Karr. Thorton had long been an resident of the adjacent Meacham Park, which was subsumed by Kirkwood via eminent domain for commercial development in the late 90′s. ELEGY TO CONNIE (2014) is a feature-length animated documentary that examines the complex events prior to and after the shootings as retold by a group of grassroots community builders who were close with the late councilwoman. The film was made partially in collaboration with these women and is based on their stories. Paulsen’s intricate and beautiful animations serve as a platform to explore memory, mass shootings, citizen representation, the utopian suburban dream, and healing after tragedy.

A discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening.

ELEGY TO CONNIE is supported by a Mid America Arts Alliance Grant underwritten by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Missouri Arts Council.

Sarah Paulsen is an artist, filmmaker and community organizer whose artwork has been exhibited widely in local and national exhibitions, and whose films have been featured in the St. Louis International Film Festival, the True/False Film Festival (St. Louis, MO), and the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, among many others. A 2010 C.A.T. Institute fellow, she has also completed numerous residencies – including the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris – and orchestrated several large-scale St. Louis-based community projects. In 2009 she founded the now-annual People’s Joy Parade on Cherokee Street, which will soon be in its sixth year. Paulsen holds a B.A. in visual art from the University of Missouri, Columbia and an M.F.A. from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University. She lives and works in St. Louis, where she teaches art and animation at the St. Louis Art Museum, Marian Middle School and the St. Louis Community College, Forest Park.

Programmed by Christy LeMaster

 
Filed under: animation, artist in attendance, documentary, experimental, video

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