About the Event
The Tank and Videology team up to present a special double feature screening of Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn’s films BLONDES IN THE JUNGLE and L FOR LEISURE. Lev Kalman will be present for a Q&A after the screening.
At Videology
308 Bedford Avenue
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
About BLONDES IN THE JUNGLE
Comedy by artist-filmmakers Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. On a hunt for the Fountain of Youth, three teenagers in 1980's Honduras buy drugs, harm nature and have magical encounters. Tons of landscape footage, a meditation on Mayan Archaeology and a heavy TV teen vibe highlight this very funny impulse-buy spiritual adventure.
Original soundtrack by 1987 World Beat band El Jefe and The Executive Look, featuring contributions by members of Aa, Asobi Seksu, Birthday Boyz, Vampire Weekend and Julianna Barwick.
“Delightfully askew”
- L Magazine
"If you could put a healing balm on the psychic wound that is the '80s, it would probably contain a dose of the original toxin. Blondes in the Jungle is just such a remedy ... [it] takes a panoramic view, at the same time gently revealing hypocrisies and reveling in a surplus of pleasures."
- Cine-File
About L FOR LEISURE
L FOR LEISURE is an impressionistic, episodic comedy about laziness, wandering and wasting time. Hanging out with teenagers when you're thirty, smoking nutmeg to get high and eating pie until you fall asleep. Teaching a dog to boogie board. Set to the rhythm of the school-year calendar, L FOR LEISURE tracks the changes to the collected spirit of a group of graduate students through 1992-93 as they go on various vacations. Sprinkled among activities like coed wrestling, macking on teenagers, and naps, are soliloquies on the heavy and heady topics of the day.
In its focus on highly thoughtful but somehow clueless characters, L FOR LEISURE is an homage to the 90s films of directors like Hal Hartley, Whit Stillman and Eric Rohmer, treating its characters and scenarios as deeply contextualized moving parts and using them to explore ideas about adulthood, lifestyle, alternate universes and sport. The original soundtrack washes between luxurious dance and echoey ambience, sometimes operating in the background and then taking the whole movie along into extended reveries. Similarly, while each character is individuated, they also reflect, repeat and meld into each other, like they are all aspects of one spirit which L FOR LEISURE is a portrait of.
“Sun-kissed, Whit Stillmanesque”
- A.O.Scott, New York Times
“Brazenly orginal”
- Sarah Salovaara, Filmmaker Magazine
“Delightful ... The period details—the Capri Sun pouches, the absurd height of all waistbands for both male and female attire, the flyers for the campus “AIDS dance”—are exact without ever becoming fussy, all the more impressive when considering that this ludic time capsule was made by directors who were only ten and eleven during the years depicted. Like Boyhood and Do the Right Thing, L for Leisure invites us to look back while pointing the way ahead.”
- Melissa Anderson, Artforum 2014
About the Filmmakers
Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn have been making films together since 2003. Their irreverent and experimental approach to narrative filmmaking mixes the exotic and artificial with the casual and idiosyncratic. This year they were named among Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking 2014. They are currently based in California.
Part of Filmmaker Breakthroughs, an ongoing series. For other screenings, please click HERE!