Experiencing Interruptions?

Nothing in the Way of Beauty

A man once set about making a place where beauty might flourish. He unlocked a door and invited everyone in. After many lifespans and a churning stream of visitors, we step through to find Tina, Chelsea, and Phoebe. One retired from government work who uses her hourly wages from Target to buy paint and canvas, another diagnosed with Asperger’s lives and works on the top floor of her mother’s row house with many pet rats, and the third a polymath, with a decade of advanced medical training, a stint in adult entertainment, and thirteen years of recovery from heroin addiction. They are both together and apart, infused with a spirit we can’t see or touch, scraping colors, moving in circles, as we wait for faces shimmering in the distance to enter.

"A brilliant new work. Film as medicine." - Cherry Jones

  • Sue Schardt
    Director
  • Sue Schardt
    Writer
  • Sue Schardt
    Producer
  • Gerard Silva
    Producer
  • Chelsea Dalsey
    Key Cast
  • Phoebe Murer
    Key Cast
  • Tina LeCoff
    Key Cast
  • Aidan Un
    Editor
  • Seth McKeever
    Animation
  • Mike Gibisser
    Colorization
    A Common Sequence (Director), World of Facts (Cinematography)
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Feature, Other
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 6 minutes 43 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 26, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    400,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (private/community)
    Philadelphia
    United States
    June 10, 2024
  • Montreal Women's Film Festival
    Montreal
    Canada
    February 20, 2024
    Winner
  • Women's Film Festival
    Philadelphia
    United States
    August 17, 2024
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Sue Schardt

Sue Schardt is a DJ, musician, and filmmaker recognized for her mission-focused leadership and innovation in public broadcasting. For her signature work, Localore: Finding America (2011-2018), she led an expansive national network of local production teams tasked with inventing new forms for making stories “with and for the people.” She began developing Nothing in the Way of Beauty in 2020 while in residence at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia.

Schardt was one of 33 artists featured in One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art (2018-19), an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles curated by Helen Molesworth. For this, she produced a continuous, 24x7 live stream originating from her studio in Boston over the course of five months. For the Mystical Theology Network, Schardt created an experiential installation, Into Becoming, turning a dance studio into a space for guests to experience the transformational effect of rest, contemplation, and sound. She’s a long-standing DJ on WMBR-FM, the free-form radio station at MIT. Her program, In the Margin of the Other, airs weekly.

Schardt is a conservatory trained musician, open water swimmer, and brings home the skill she honed in commercial kitchens to cook for people she loves. Her two guiding principles come from her clarinet teacher, Joe Allard, who said “to blow is not to play,” and Chef Laura Brennan, who advised that “water is the magic ingredient.”

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Director Statement

This work grew out of happenstance. I sat on a bench next to a stranger. I wanted to make new work. He said, “Come here!” So I did. “Here” was the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia.

I’m a DJ and musician. I arrived with only questions…about Sam Fleisher and his vision for the school. No tuition, no grades, and entrance required only an appreciation for beauty and a desire to learn to draw. What’s become of that dream, I wondered? Who are the people who gather here? One hundred twenty five years on, was there evidence…a trace of spirit, something I couldn’t see or touch, but might follow?

Then came the unimaginable. Across the world, we fell into isolation. My questions, now, from Boston to Philadelphia – in long phone conversations. After each call, I’d ask… “can you record what you described? Send it to me?” gathering glimpses of people I’d never met. Tina, Phoebe, Chelsea.

Out of a field of separation and invisibility they led, with their consistent “yes-es” to each of my requests. The repository of experience collected on cell phones and Go Pros grew as I continued my back-in-time pursuit of Sam.

A year and half passed before I met them. Aidan and I began shooting with them, giving rise to a form imbued deep reciprocity.

Most of us share a desire to not disappear. It seems to be something hard-wired into our species. We carve our names into marble, name rivers and mountains, even having children springs from this urge for immortality. The truth is, one life is just one life. For most of us, little of what we said or did remains after we’re gone.

Guglielmo Marconi discovered radio waves and invented the means to transmit them. He also had a theory that every sound ever made was forever recoverable, simply growing fainter and fainter until it was beyond hearing. He hoped to create a technology sensitive enough to detect these invisible streaks, to be able to retrieve the sound of Christ delivering his Sermon on the Mount. Marconi didn’t achieve this dream, and I find the freedom it suggests is what I hope to convey in this work. All sounds, like spirit, held equally –silent, beyond our reach – flowing forward and backward, intersecting and unfolding in a timeless way.