To Fondle Nothing

THE STORY BEHIND THIS FILM:

In the spring of 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, the local weekly news rag THE STRANGER put out a call for DIY short films about lockdown, called the Confinement online Film Festival (CoFF). Guidelines featured a five-minute maximum length, and "extra credit" if toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and dry pantry goods could be worked in. I ignored the call until the deadline was extended to mid-May, then decided, What the hell. I shot and edited it on my iPhone 7 Plus, and spent no money doing so. While I was making the film, starting on or around May 12-13, I was thinking fondly of my senior colleague, the beloved filmmaker Lynn Shelton. I had been an admirer of her work, and then had had the opportunity to work with her in 2016 on her feature OUTSIDE IN, with Edie Falco, the Duplass brothers, and Kaitlyn Dever. I figured CoFF might appeal to Ms. Shelton's considerable mischievous streak, and that if she also wasn't busy making a short for the festival, perhaps she (a previous winner of the annual $5,000 STRANGER Genius Award) had been roped into judging it. I barely finished the film on time, and the very day after I submitted it, I woke up to the terrible news that Ms. Shelton had suddenly passed away. Even though she had been living in Los Angeles of late, the entire film community in Seattle, where she had prosecuted much of her career, was convulsed with grief. She was just a few weeks older than I.

In the months since, TO FONDLE NOTHING crossed my mind several times, in terms of, what else I might be able to do with it. It had not been selected to appear in CoFF, had never been publicly aired. I was troubled by two things about the film. First, its soundtrack had begun with about a dozen seconds of an acoustic harmonica recording I had made 25 years ago for the sound design of a Fringe theatre production. I realized--which is to say, remembered, after submitting to CoFF--that the opener was actually a melodic fragment from a late '60s pop tune, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." I'd need to replace that with something of my own. I was also concerned about the "extra credit" lockdown-related imagery. I mean, I never even bothered trying to find hand sanitizer throughout the early height of the pandemic, but. Might not an audience knowing nothing of CoFF's "extra credit" wonder why in the hell toilet paper and a big pot of kidney beans were barging in to make featured cameos in my film?

I returned to the project in early April 2021 with some ideas. I blew a fresh bit of blues harp for the opening seconds of the soundtrack, and decided, as regards the pandemic isolation business, to embrace and enhance it, rather than fret about it. Thus, the piece is now subtitled "A Lockdown-and-Out Blues," and one more piece of iconic pandemicana has been added...and you'll just have to see the movie to find out what.

I also burnished the end credits, which for CoFF had been desultory at best--and included a dedication to the memory of Lynn Shelton.

For film festivals outside of the United States that require English subtitles for public screenings, I have the film hardcoded with those available, as well as an .srt file. The hardcoded version has also been uploaded unlisted onto YouTube, and I can send that link along. I now also have an Italian translation of the poem for subtitling--by Italian filmmaker Lorenzo Baldi, of Rome!

The screener here on FilmFreeway, or as an unlisted YouTube video, or via file delivery with WeTransfer, or a snail-mailed thumb drive, are currently the means I possess for disseminating the film. I am about as independent as independent filmmakers get: DCPs, DVDs and BluRay, I am sorry to say it, are well above my pay grade at this time.

SUMMER 2022 UPDATE:

As regards TFN, the film has been selected by five additional festivals, bringing its grand total to 21, all occurring this fall. In September, the film will make its Scottish debut in the Deep Fried Film Festival, and its West Coast (and Pacific Northwest) debut in the Gorst Underground Film Festival in Western Washington. In early October, it will make its California debut at the We Make Movies International Film Festival. In mid-October, its Georgia debut occurs in Atlanta as a nominee for Best One Person Show/Solo Sketch in the All the Laughs Comedy Awards, and late in the month, TFN will return to Italy--this time to Genoa, for an appearance in FLIGHT / Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genoa, with its brand new Italian translation, by Lorenzo Baldi of Rome.

Speaking of Italy: Yours truly has recently returned from a five-week filmmaking jaunt there, as a participant in the "Traveling Campus" known as Cinemadamare. Dozens of (mostly young) filmmakers--screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, actors, editors, even musicians--convene; they arrive in a town, divide into groups, each working on a film project, and have roughly a week to write, cast, produce, shoot, edit and score a short film set in the town they've come to. The films are then screened in the town square, in competition, at week's end. As I write this (early August), they are still at it--the thing runs three months! I was there for the first four weeks of competition, and made films in Rome (specifically, the neighborhood known as Testaccio), Fiuggi, Sepino, and Possagno. I conceived and directed a poetry film of Italian writer Elsa Morante's poem "Minna the Cat"; conceived a music video of a song I wrote and recorded called "The Only Kind of Stone I Could Not Love" (that's how Michelangelo referred to his kidney stones), which won Best Music in Fiuggi; I conceived, wrote and directed a poetry film about Grimoald I, a 7th century Lombard king, which contributed also to my Best Actor award for the week in Sepino (I acted in roughly 15 films over the course of the month); and I conceived, shot and directed a poetry film of William Noel Hodgson's WWI poem "Before Action," with footage I shot touring a WWI trench up in the Italian Alps.

DECEMBER 2021 UPDATE:

TFN has had a busy December! The film screened online (due to Covid) in the International Art Film Festival out of London on Dec. 3rd; fresh off its November 13 screening in Belgrade, Serbia, where the River Sava meets the Danube, at the wonderful MikroFAF -- International Festival of DIY and indie short film (its live European debut, which I took myself over the pond to attend), it was included by MikroFAF in a selection from their festival screened on Dec. 8 in Aveiro, Portugal, at and co-sponsored by VIC // Aveiro Arts House and Núcleo de Cinema e Fotografia - AAUAv. The film was an Honorable Mention in the Newcastle International Short Film Festival in New South Wales, Australia (Dec. 10-11), and rounded out the year screening live on the 16th in Modica, Sicily, as part of Versi di Luce, a festival devoted entirely to the intersection of film and poetry.

In October, I attended the film's North American Premiere at the Black Bear Film Festival in Milford, Pennsylvania, along the banks of the Delaware River in the Poconos. The Sands Film Festival, out of Jacksonville Beach, FL, screened the film online in late October. TFN has won four monthly/bimonthly festival events: Best Mobile Phone Short in the July 2021 Auber International Film Festival, in Aubervilliers, Paris, France; the "Halicarnassus Special Winner" for Best First-Time Director in Session 12 of the Halicarnassus Film Festival in Bodrum, Turkey; the August 2021 Jury Special Award for Best Mobile Phone Short in the Europe Film Festival, based this year in London; and ”Special Golden Winner” for Best First-Time Director in the August-September 2021 Best Istanbul Film Festival. The film has now garnered eighteen sets of Official Selection laurels. In other monthly/bimonthly action, TFN was a Finalist in the August 2021 Luleå Film Festival in Sweden and a Semi-Finalist in the August 2021 Sweden Film Awards, in addition to its July selections in the New York Flash Film Festival and Frostbite International Film Festival.