harmony korine (a sort of retrospective) – Gummo

Please join us for harmony korine (a sort of retrospective), curated and hosted by Wesley Stokes, with support from Press Street and Charitable Film Network.  For more information contact youngisdumb@gmail.com.

Harmony Korine (b. 1973) is an American filmmaker and writer whose work is some of the most imaginative and appalling in the canon of cinema today.Raised in Nashville, Tennessee and later in New York City, Korine has made and written films that seek to show a true beauty in characters that are marginalized in society. Blurring the lines between the scripted and reality, his movies are filled with white trash, drugged up teens, celebrity impersonators, the elderly, and the mentally ill all of whom often actually play themselves making viewers both cringe in horror and feel a sweet sadness in their honesty. Familiar themes of tap dancing and fantastical urban legends riddle the storyline of his films and leave the viewer confused but satisfied by what they’ve just experienced.

Friday, March 29th
6:00 pm – Gummo (1997 / Directed by Harmony Korine)
For his first feature length film, Korine follows a series of characters through the town of Xenia, Ohio (all principal shooting was actually done in Nashville), a town devastated by a tornado in the 70’s. While there are a few main characters that keep a narrative structure or sorts, most of the film is a series of sketches and real people that Korine documented during the course of the filming. The intention was to capture characters that he saw in Nashville on a regular basis that he had never seen represented on screen.

Most of the story follows two adolescents, Tummler and Solomon, as they ride around on bicycles looking for stray cats that they can kill and sell to a Chinese restaurant to buy money for glue sniffing. The iconic “Bunny Boy” is a mute character that appears in the film at various points as an almost surreal ambassador for the storyline which is otherwise mostly collaged together as opposed to the traditional three act format for a film.  (Followed by a Q + A with actor Jacob Sewell who played “The Bunny Boy” in the film).