So Pretty
Directed by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
Now Available for Digital Rental via Sentient.Art.Film
Four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel so schön by Ronald M. Schernikau.
A transgender visual artist, Tonia, comes to New York City in 2018, where she meets her American boyfriend, the academic Franz, and works on an new exhibition of a work built around the legacy of German author Ronald M. Schernikau. Tonia and Franz talk politics, art, and love, go dancing, drink coffee, fuck, protest, and organize alongside their friends, the couple Paul and Erika, a transwoman and musician, and Helmut, a transmaculine political radical. When Paul becomes injured by the police following a political action, their social space is momentarily shattered. At the same time, the audience comes to realize that their lives and the film are morphing into a version of Schernikau’s novella so schön, a communist-themed depiction of four lovers in 1980s Berlin, read aloud by the characters throughout the film in voice-over and at the art installation. The film is overlaid with a mosaic of music from Rachika S, who also plays Erika, and a host of female electronic musicians.
An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right wing world, So Pretty moves freely between fictional depictions and semi-documentary, adaptation and translation, looking towards the artistic and personal worlds its characters generate across time and culture as a space for new tensions and potentials.
“It will all work out, little mouse. It will be something totally different than we can imagine."
-Ronald M.Schernikau, So Schön
Completed. Development funding awarded by Centre national des arts plastiques.
Awards
WINNER - Best International Feature, FIC Valdivia
WINNER - Janela Critic's Prize, Best Feature, Janela International de Cinema do Recife
WINNER - Best Feature, KRAK, Zinegoak Film Festival
HONORABLE MENTION - #14, Film Comment Best Undistributed Films, 2019
Screenings
Berlin International Film Festival
IndieLisboa
BAM Cinemafest
Edinburgh International Film Festival
New Horizons International Film Festival Wrocław
FIDMarseille
FIC Valdivia
Göteburg Film Festival
Janela International de Cinema do Recife
NewFest
American Fringe at La Cinémathèque Française
Women Under the Influence
Denver International Film Festival
Milwaukee Film Festival
Festival Transcinema Peru
Cuórum Morelia
Bushwick Film Festival
Contrast Film Festival Austin
La Casa Encendida Madrid
queerfilm festival Bremen
Lustreifen Film Festival Basel
LesGaiCineMad
Toronto Queer Film Festival
Wanda Feminist Film Festival Belfast
Festival les Créatives Geneva
Cinema of Gender Transgression at Anthology Film Archives
Museum of Impossible Forms
Zinegoak Film Festival
Wolf Kino Berlin
Streaming on Mubi, March 2020
Tacoma Film Festival
Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival
Accolades
"A bold, refreshing, sexy, and beautifully rendered film of warmth, intelligence, and desire. Original, breathtaking."
— Caden Mark Gardner, Mubi Notebook
“A clear highlight ... the kind of American independent film that deserves the spotlight treatment.”
— Vikram Murthi, RogerEbert.com
“Inventing the queer gaze in front of our eyes.”
— IndieWire
“Visually sumptuous [...] so eloquent about New York life, yet there’s not much else out there like it. A must-see.”
— Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, Artforum
"Rovinelli asks what trans films usually don’t: What if what had to transition was the world?"
— McKenzie Wark, e-flux
“[An] excellent meta-theatrical film about love in the 21st century.”
— Carla Moseguí, Cineuropa
“As a document of its moment in time, place and political conjuncture, So Pretty is already of inestimable value, but the film is also marked by assured, sensitive direction and a visual flair that at times matches the intensity of its literary inspiration.”
— Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema
"A balmy sea to momentarily float in, a dialectic Gatorade to replenish with before being thrust back out into the exhaustive brutalism of the current moment."
— Mark Lukenbill, Screen Slate
“[A] key document of a specific people in a specific place in an uncertain time.”
— Jordan Cronk, Film Comment
“[A] lovely meditative film. […] Rovinelli is an extraordinary young talent I am keeping my eye on.”
— Vaginal Davis
“Tender and dreamlike images … in which [Rovinelli] goes exploring and asks us with great warmth to follow her. […] So Pretty is an appeal to overcoming divisions and a call for us to build new communities and alliances.”
— Manuel Schubert, TAZ
Credits
83min / Color / Super 16mm / USA/France / 2019
Written, Directed & Edited by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
Cinematography by Bill KirsteinBased on the novel by Ronald M. Schernikau
Featuring. Edem Dela-Seshie, Thomas Love, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, and Rachika SProduced by 100 Year Films in association with Les Films du Bal
Producers. Anne Coburn, Bill Kirstein, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, and Judith Lou Lévy
