Trich Arts

An experimental film that lifts the veil on the world of African American drag racing.

SPICEBUSH interweaves various fragmentary narratives concerning education, luck. landscapes, gaining and losing a job, and the passage of time. The technique and style employed alternates between the documentary, the symbolic, and more conventionally scripted scenes. Filming individuals engaged in their careers conveys the documentary aspect. At a symbolic level, the fossil is a leitmotif suggesting past and present. The title of the film refers to the state butterfly of Mississippi, Spicebush Swallowtail. In the film, Mississippi is a place of origin. The Spicebush Swallowtail represents renewal or starting over. Throughout the film, a little girl appears in different guises and settings, functioning indirectly in the role of the chorus. The scripted scenes, shot in a documentary style, collaged with the other scenes begin to create the traces of a narrative structure.

This short is based on Chester Himes’s novel Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and its adaptation for the screen by Ossie Davis in 1970. The cotton in the novel and film comes from the region around Columbus, Mississippi. Shot in noir-style, the film focuses on the scene when detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones interrogate Lo-Boy, an artist/hustler, about the event around the demise of his friend Early Riser.

Centred on a scene from Tennessee Williams’s play Kingdom of Earth (1968). Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus. Filmed as if it were a stage play, the title character, Chicken of Kingdom, struggles with how people view him.

Rita Larson's Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. Rita Larson's Boy is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films are based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi. The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson (Rita Larson's boy) in the television series Sanford and Son. Tombigbee is the river the runs though Columbus.

Quality Control consists of a series of 16mm single take shots filmed in the summer of 2010,over a two day period, in a dry cleaners facility in Pritchard, Alabama, near Mobile, Quality Control exhibits the acts as well the conditions around labor and showcases, in Everson's words "the fine folks of Alabama producing a superior product." It is similar stylistically, in form and rhythm, to certain scenarios in Everson's award-winning and critically acclaimed previous films, including Erie (IFFR 2010) and in thematic concerns to several other short form works which follow the daily, quotidian tasks of workers in rest and in motion, and is an oblique sequel, ten years hence, to Everson's Creative Capital granted project A Week in the Hole (2001), which focused on an employee's adjustment to materials, time, space and personnel. - Written by Madeleine Molyneaux, producer

The art of the cutaway.