Some Kind of Paradise

Covering the New/Next at publications like Filmmaker and In Review Online gives me the pleasure of reporting to the greater film community about what’s going on in Baltimore, but also forces me to question the limits of my “objectivity.” This is particularly hairy as the friends I’ve made in this town who love movies, who I help make movies with when I can, are now getting in and becoming legitimized to a certain degree. However, it’d be irresponsible not to report on the up-and-coming, which I’m increasingly confident many of my friends are, and I’ll be shameless here.

I’ll start by dropping any pretense of objectivity and highlight one of my editors at Splice Today, Nicky Otis Smith. I’m indebted to Nicky for offering me this column, and it’s been a delight that during the last 18 months I’ve also gotten to see him grow in his ambition as a filmmaker. He first had me on one of his sets during the production of Satur-19 (which will premiere December 6th at the Mercury Theater), and since that production he’s teased out segments as experimental collage film shorts. This form that he has adopted reached its zenith in Whenever I Died I Died 1,000 Times, which publicly debuted as a part of the “Poetic Fractals” program at New/Next. His aggressive array of overlaying images and threading colors is an overwhelming emotional experience when paired with Smith’s own vibrant, ethereal music compositions. Like much of Smith’s work, I think the narrative could best be described with David Lynch’s logline for Inland Empire (2006): it’s about a woman in trouble.

Most of my local buddies are going to be seen at New/Next hanging around the Maryland Shorts program, one tailored to attract the likes of us. I ran the B-camera (you can tell which shots are mine—they’re largely out of focus and filmed with an unstable hand) for Jake Binstock’s first narrative short since arriving in Baltimore this January, Tommy’s Toenails. A true shoestring, DIY film, Tommy’s Toenails, if I remember correctly, was made for about $300 and a couple of days on the weekend (and almost a third of that budget went to bribing an old lady in Dundalk to shoot a shot of the downed Key Bridge from her backyard). Tommy’s Toenails follows a man (Tommy Parker) suffering from CTE who just can’t catch a break anywhere to clip his toenails. It’s a simple premise that sets itself up for perfect picaresque playfulness, where Tommy’s fleeing from one disgraced toenail-clipping-location acts as the impetus for Binstock to turn his new home of Baltimore into a world of storytelling imagination—all the nooks, crannies, and corners of the city are explored with a camera.

DP’ing Tommy’s Toenails was Michael Lentz, who had a short in the same program, Black Wealth. Lentz pulls a trick in his documenting Derwin—a squeegee kid working the intersections in the days leading up to the city’s massive retaliation against the practice in 2022—in that what first appears to be standard observational doc focused on a person who’s found themselves centered in a hot-button political issue, slowly evolves into a genuinely human portrait. I remember during the Maryland Film Festival this May when during one of the programs, I don’t remember which, the person doing the intro mentioned that MdFF gets over a dozen squeegee movies submitted each year, and I nudged Mike knowing his was one, and didn’t get in. That was ultimately for the better, though, because if people were to try to hold up Black Wealth as a singular example of movie-about-an-issue in terms of squeegeeing, it wouldn’t fit at all, because it’s too humanely specific to fall into a generic or broad trend politicized topic. Instead, in Lentz’s documentary practice, he doesn’t find ideas or debates, he finds people.

The one good friend of mine whose film work has been evolving in the last five years who did not make it through selection at New/Next is Lukas Armstrong-Laird. His latest, Paradise, which (like many of his others) slipped itself onto Vimeo after not making it into his target festivals, I imagine at least in part because of its hostile formal demands, wherein Armstrong-Laird plays aggressively with audience expectation, building on logic by which the film operates and then quietly shattering it to bits, giving the viewer ample time to put all the pieces back together and find what it means. Paradise is a seemingly simple movie where the principle action is just a woman finding a painting and making a cake, but in it Armstrong-Laird searches for the most recurring theme in his work: home. It comes after a cycle of shorts that acted as a saying-goodbye to his childhood house in Vermont, and his last picture Slow Down Cowboy, which I co-starred alongside him in, a swan song to me and his apartment we lived in when we first transplanted to Baltimore five years ago and were then forced out of. His cinema is a listless one, at once firmly thematically planted, but stylistically aggravated by any demands put on it. It’s a cinema that knows what it wants to be, where it wants to be, but finds something unattainable in the way, and breaks with convention at every turn to fight back, to grasp some kind of paradise.