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Below Dreams (2014)
The Archive showcases the latest work from UCLA alumna and New Orleans-based, independent writer-director Garrett Bradley on Friday, August 28 at 7:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater. Her impressive debut feature, Below Dreams (2014), will be followed by the North American premiere of Cover Me (2015) and a post-screening conversation with the filmmaker.
Below Dreams, which premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, is an impressionistic and candid portrait of three struggling young adults in New Orleans. The film was adapted from a series of interviews conducted on a Greyhound bus while Bradley traveled from New York to Louisiana. In Indiewire, Bradley explains, “I made this film for the people who are too rarely in the room or validated in their individual persistence for life.” Critic Matt Brennan acclaimed Bradley’s distinct cinematic style: “This skill for metamorphosis is on display in Bradley's superb debut feature ... a deft blend of the dreamlike and the down-to-earth ... It's an aesthetic that resists simplistic distinctions between documentary and narrative filmmaking.”
Garrett Bradley
A joint project with artist Tameka Norris, Bradley's latest feature Cover Me depicts the daily life of an aspiring singer, employing long takes and intense close-ups to create a powerful, personal narrative.
Archive programmer Paul Malcolm was struck by the film when it premiered at the 2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam: “Cover Me takes us into the subjective experience of a young, Millennial artist working through various ways of being and performing in the world, both in public and private. It's thematic terrain that has been the gist for countless American indie films over the last decade, but Bradley approaches it in a unique way that strips the subject down to its essences ... Together, Below Dreams and Cover Me clearly announce Bradley as an important, rising talent.”
Bradley earned her MFA at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 2012. She is the recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award, The Lynn Weston Fellowship, The Motion Picture Association of America Award and The Mary Pickford Award. Her current project, American Rhapsody, offers a thoughtful engagement with film archives, technology and production to recover and reimagine a lost history of African American silent cinema. “Again, you find this clear, confident voice that's not taking the usual approach to subjects we've seen before,” says Malcolm.
Watch the trailer for Below Dreams (2014):
An Evening with Garrett Bradley takes places on Friday, August 28 at 7:30 p.m. Details and tickets >
– Nicole Carroll
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