I’m pleased to announce the documentary that I cut, “The New West Coast Sound”, has won a 2021 LA Area Emmy Award.
So happy to have worked with such a conscientious and thoughtful group of filmmakers on this project.
You can watch the documentary here:
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/episodes/the-new-west-coast-sound-an-l-a-jazz-legacy
"“The New West Coast Sound: An L.A. Jazz Legacy”, a documentary I cut for KCET in Los Angeles, has been nominated for the 2021 Emmy Awards, in the category of L.A. Local Color.
Read about the announcement.
You can watch the full film on KCET’s website:
The website Post-Punk has graciously offered to premiere the Music Video I directed for The Old Year. Click thru the image for the link!
From their website:
Writer/Director Jonathan Ade and his production company Jonokino have teamed up with boutique production company Best Frenemies to produce a new music video for electronic/pop single I’ve Been Dreaming, a brainchild of Brooklyn/DC duo The Old Year (Laura Eve Engel and Paul Erik Lipp). The video is set to release worldwide October 9th, 2020.
Drawing on rock, country, and jazz influences from the 1940s-60s, as well as standards from the Great American Songbook, The Old Year brings forth dark pop songs shimmering with nostalgia, with dreams toward a brighter future. The rich vocals are peppered with a synth, hearkening back to that “80s does 50s” sound with a bluesy, Lynchian touch. I’ve Been Dreaming has a wistful feeling: a little bit of the sentiment behind the Rolling Stones’ As Tears Go By, a little bit of that delicious Kirsty MacColl kick.
The aesthetic is echoed in the video’s dreamscape, with hot spotlights illuminating scenes in a darkened roller rink. It calls to mind those half-remembered childhood excursions wheeling around the concrete loop, the flashes of the strobe, the dizzying disco ball, the sinister innocence of early adolescence. It also has that eerie feel of a ghost hunting show, but the only ghosts here are fuzzy memories and the evolution of youth.
“Laura Eve is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and when she started collaborating with Paul, I knew I wanted to make a video for this group,” Ade says. “When I first listened to this single, I was brought back to my teenage years: the testing of boundaries, the trying on and rejecting of personas, the continual discovery of who we are as individuals. I think the final video reflects those ideas. It’s also kinda spooky.”
The executive producer of Best Frenemies, Gabe Meyers, adds a few thoughts: “We’re thrilled to bring Jonathan’s concept to fruition as Best Frenemies’s premiere music video production. Helping a director with such a distinct voice put his vision on film is what Best Frenemies does best. “We hope to work with Jonathan again soon.”
“A Different Kind of Force”, the documentary I spent most of last year editing, has won a Peabody Award. It’s a real honor to share this award with Ed Ou and Kitra Cahana, two of the most conscientious filmmakers I’ve had the pleasure to work with.
I’ve been sitting on this news for the last two weeks with a sense of dread. It’s roughly a year old, and in that time my feelings and perspective, particularly on the police’s role in society, have shifted quite dramatically. I was ready to disregard the documentary as an embarrassing byproduct of my ignorance and privilege.
Having watched it again last night for the first time in months, I am relieved it isn’t quite that. If anything, it’s a tightly organized pile of puzzle pieces, a series of societal problems I wasn’t quite sure fit together. Now, it’s so incredibly, glaringly obvious they do that I’m unsure how I missed it.
The police officers in this documentary, as well-meaning and earnest as they are, should not be doing this work. The societal need is in qualified mental health workers that do not carry weapons. It is in mental health facilities that don’t release their patients as soon as they’re stabilized. It is in Medicare-For-All, so that everyone in need can receive the long-term treatment necessary for chronic mental health problems. We need to reallocate the resources we put into training cops back into the community, thereby simultaneously reducing the scope of their job description and their community’s reliance on them in the first place.
You can’t train officers to both be active assessors of dangerous risk and also empathetic caseworkers. Those impulses are fundamentally at odds with one another. In what remains the most telling part of the documentary for me, Tre is asked to reconcile the fact that he’s called to save citizens while holstering a weapon that can kill them. Understandably, he gets tripped up. As a cop, the majority of his training is to recognize and neutralize threats. His mental health speciality, the CIT training, is a thin veneer, and it’s incredibly dangerous to mistake it for the substance of policing. The substance is a protective, antagonistic fraternity that upholds the culture of white supremacy while resisting scrutiny and accountability, a system that directly targeted Ed as a member of the press a week ago in Minneapolis, leaving him with literal scars.
This is the bedrock, I believe, of “Defund the Police.” We need to completely rethink societal services, what purpose they serve, and most importantly, WHO they serve and don’t serve. To pretend that reform is an achievable goal, that all we need is “more training” and “body cameras”, is a disingenuous and dangerous platitude.
So, if you decide to watch the documentary, please keep in mind this sobering afterward. Hopefully, the film can be a tool in building a more equitable world that serves all of its citizens.
I spent most of last year working on an incredibly challenging documentary about policing and the mental health system in San Antonio, TX. Now that documentary is nominated for a Peabody Award.
A full list of the nominees can be found here. We’re proud to share with them this honor.
Yesterday on MSNBC, Co-Director Ed Ou spoke with host Ali Velshi about our documentary and the intersection of policing and mental illness. Check it out!
CW: MENTAL ILLNESS, SUICIDAL IDEATION, POLICE VIOLENCE
The documentary I've been working on for the last eight months is finally out in the world.
This is a feature. A tough one. A personal one. It's about the intersection of mental illness, policing, class, race and the culture we chose to live in. If you're in a good space for it, I invite you to take a break from the 24 hour news cycle and deep dive into this story.
The AwesomenessTV show that I cut last year, “Guidance”, is now available to watch on Hulu!
My particular episodes are 3-4, and 9-10. Though featuring a variety of network-imposed YA dramatic trappings (forgive the dreadful cold-open music choices), this season pushed the envelope with discussions of race, class, and sexual agency in an era of inescapable social media. In many ways, it predicted how vulnerable these online platforms are to misinformation and distortion, and that there are real consequences for imagined behavior.
I’m proud to have worked on it. Enjoy!
"The Kill List" has just won the OPC David A. Andelman Award, honoring the best in TV or video international reporting showing a concern for the human condition.
https://opcofamerica.org/overseas-press-club-of-america-announces-annual-award-winners/
If you haven't seen it already, I invite you to check out what happens when the leader of a country demands the death penalty for drug dealers.
I'm pleased to announce that the documentary I cut last summer, "The Kill List" for NBC Left Field, has been awarded third place in Documentary Journalism by Pictures of the Year International (POYI).
http://poyi.org/75/75winnerslist.html
Congratulations to all the winners. I'm honored to be amongst you.
The spookiest of mornings to you. Last year, during my residency, I collaborated with the students and faculty of Interlochen Center for the Arts to create a Halloween-themed music video. I'm pleased to say it's finally complete.
Music is "Crime" by Night Sequels, who also did some of the music for Lay in Wait.
To everyone who worked on it, thanks for your patience. Share and enjoy!
The short documentary that I cut over the summer, "The Kill List", has been selected as one of Vimeo's Staff Picks.
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines was elected with the promise of killing drug users, and in the last year about 7-12,000 Filipinos have been killed extrajudiciously, either by the police themselves or rogue vigilante groups. A few months ago, Trump called Duterte and congratulated him on his “success” in tackling the country’s drug problem.
This is a VERY disturbing film to view, but if you feel like you’re in a good enough place to be challenged, I would love for you to watch it.
I had the great pleasure to work on the show Guidance earlier this year for AwesomenessTV. Sure, it mostly exists to fulfill young adults' appetite for seeing YouTube celebrities be dramatic actors. But our team tried to do something a little more interesting with it, and I think it paid off!
Note: because some exec somewhere is terrified people won't watch anything over 8 minutes, each 22 minute episode has been split into three parts. This is profoundly dumb, but also it means that the episodes that I cut, originally 3, 4, 9 and 10, are now 7-12 and 25-30. Please excuse a networks inability to give any audience the benefit of the doubt.
With all the changes going on in my life lately, I haven't had much time to reflect on a bittersweet milestone. My short film Lay in Wait, a delicious albatross that I've been wearing around my neck for the last four years, will be completing its festival run this weekend at the South Dakota Film Festival.
Y'all know how much this movie has meant to me. It's seen the start (and end) of at least three romantic relationships. It's seen my change of residence from LA to SC to NE to SC to ATL to MI and back to ATL. It's given me, as a precious little gift, a bundle of every conceivable emotion, from euphoria to bone-grating frustration to depression to well-earned peace.
It's easily the most ambitious, and most difficult thing I've ever had to make. And like a lot of projects that we do, I'm a different person now than when I began to make it. I hope a wiser and more considerate artist, one who's ready to move on.
So thank you all. I've said this from the very beginning, but I couldn't have made this project without your help. I'm only as good as you allow me to be.
I'm pleased to announce that "Lay in Wait" has been awarded Best Drama Short at the 2016 Atlanta Underground Film Festival. Many thanks to the curators for this great honor, and to Atlanta for the warm welcome.
I'm pleased to announce that Lay in Wait will complete its festival run in a city that I now call home, at the 2016 Atlanta Underground Film Festival.
The event will be:
Friday, August 19, 2016 at the Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta
7:30pm, part of the Deeper Understanding block of shorts.
Tickets may be bought here.
My sincere hope is to see you there!
2015 was a great festival year for “Lay In Wait”. After appearing at the Laguna Film Festival, we were pleased to additionally screen at the East Lansing Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale Int. Film Festival, Reading FilmFEST, and Blow-Up Chicago.
And now, we have two new festivals for 2016: the North Wales International Film Festival, and marking our NYC premiere, the Queens World Film Festival!
So, NYC friends, here’s your chance to see “Lay in Wait” on the big screen:
Friday March 18, 2016
8:00 pm
PS 69 Jackson Heights, Queens, NY
Details and tickets here.
Thanks to all our supporters, friends and family! We’re very proud of this film, and will be releasing it publicly online in Spring 2016.
I’m pleased to announce that I have been selected as the Spring 2016 Filmmaker-In-Residence at the Interlochen Academy for the Arts, one of the oldest and most prestigious year-round arts academies in the country.
I will be spending the first five months of next year teaching artistically-minded students the philosophy of cinematography while planning for my first feature. Many thanks to the folks at the Department for Motion Picture Arts for this great honor and opportunity.
As promised, we have the full Q&A from the SAG Foundation Screening last week. I hope you enjoy a full thirty minutes of cinematic wisdom, literally in profile. Also, here’s a pro tip for when you appear on camera - don’t wear white.
In addition, here’s the press from the Emerson Los Angeles Film Festival on Saturday:
For those in Southern California that are kicking themselves for missing these screenings, we’re going to have one more this weekend. On Saturday, October 17th, at 6pm, the Laguna Film Festival will be showing Lay in Wait as part of their inaugural festival. We’re honored to take part!
Tickets can be purchased here.
Lay in Wait had a fantastic weekend in Los Angeles. Last Friday, we screened at the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, where a packed audience of SAG performers watched the film and heard in a focused Q&A how we brought the project to life.
Then, on Saturday, we screened in competition at the 15th Annual Emerson Los Angeles Film Festival as a part of the Alumni “Best of Fest” designation. The festival honors both current students and distinguished alumni in their efforts to bring their projects to the world. And I’m pleased to say that we won!
We will bring you photos and video of the live event as soon as we have them.