Presented by Bread Garden Market, Little Village, and FilmScene
DIALOGUE: Filmmaker Luiza Parvu in person
Sunday, May 19, 7pm
Vino Vérité welcomes Luiza Parvu for a film about living a creative life and being a good neighbor.
The Vino Vérité series features talented new voices and established filmmakers influenced by the vérité tradition in person to present their thought-provoking, chance-taking, and visually-arresting films. Each selection is paired with hand-selected wines from Bread Garden Market.
Tickets: $25 public / $20 members / $12 students. Includes wine tasting, film, hors d'oeuvres and filmmaker reception.
6:30 Hors d'oeuvres & wine tasting
7:00 Screening
8:45 Q&A + Reception with filmmaker, wine and dessert
"An ideal meeting between filmmaker and subject... Flying Lessons is wholly unique, hilarious, and moving." — IndieWire
"The film’s genre is neither 'affable first-person Amerindie doc' nor 'uber-formalist European hybrid poetry,' successfully occupying an understated spot in between." — Filmmaker Magazine
"An aesthetically beautiful film that is not without its rough edges, envisioning grace where others could see thorns." — Moveable Fest
ABOUT FLYING LESSONS
When her rent-controlled Lower East Side apartment complex is purchased by "The Bernie Madoff of Landlords," filmmaker Elizabeth Nichols naturally brings a camera to document the tenant's fight. Her camera quickly gravitates to her outspoken flame-haired neighbor, Philly Abe. Their camaraderie in the fight against gentrification expands into a mutual exploration of art and what it means to be a good neighbor.
Philly reveals her years as a No Wave punk performer, mixed-media artist, and underground film star working with the likes of Todd Verow. The film excavates Philly’s archive to explore the emotional journey of a woman trying to understand herself in the midst of NYC’s cultural crisis and with the weight of a terminal illness diagnosis. Blurring the traditional lines between filmmaker and participant, their friendship spills over to the screen. A tender portrait of an iconoclast, an self-aware examination of art and relationships, a cultural critique — Flying Lessons, appropriately, refuses to be pigeonholed.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Elizabeth Nichols (Director, Cinematographer, Writer, Producer) is a fiction and nonfiction filmmaker. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017 with an MFA in Filmmaking, has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in Film, and is the recipient of a New York Women in Film and Television Scholarship, the Wasserman Directing Award, the Alan Landsburg Documentary Production Award and the Princess Grace Award. Her films have played at Toronto International Film Festival and the Berlinale. She currently lives in Tanzania, East Africa with her partner and their two daughters, and works at Orkeeswa as the Director of Strategy and the creator of Story Lab where she teaches filmmaking. Flying Lessons is her debut feature film.
Luiza Parvu (Editor, Writer, Co-Producer) is a Romanian filmmaker and educator based in Tempe, AZ. She is a member of the European Film Academy and holds an MFA in Film Production from NYU's Tisch School of The Arts. Her films have been recognized in festivals across the world, including Karlovy Vary, Sundance, BFI London, and Tribeca. Her work spans across genres and formats, in fiction and documentary film, as well as in multimedia installation, exploring identity, memory, intersection and transformation, She is currently an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Poitier Film School and a programmer for the Mimesis Documentary Festival.
True/False Film Festival (2024) — World Premiere
First Look (2024) — Official Selection