Giuseppe Makes a Movie

Adam Rifkin / 2014 / 82 minutes
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DETAILS

  • 82 min
  • Color
  • 1.85:1

FORMATS

    Art & Design: Adrian Kolarczyk

    While the rest of America slept, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in Independence Day and Detroit Rock City) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like Doily’s Summer of Freak Occurrences, Trailer Town and Utopia Blues. Set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California), they are populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility.

    Director Adam Rifkin (Look, The Dark Backward) creates a wildly surreal, outrageously funny and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist inhabiting a world few of us even know exists, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, Garbanzo Gas, starring Vietnam Ron as a Cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

    The stranger-than-fiction documentary explores the Giuseppe universe, showing how the self-taught filmmaker captures an unexpected level of humanism and creates a family unit for a group of people who need one.

    An Official Selection of Hot Docs Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) and the Rooftop Films Summer Series.

    Production Companies: Cinemad, Blump’s International Films
    Director: Adam Rifkin
    Producers: Adam Rifkin, Mike Plante
    Executive Producers: Robin Greenspun, Joanne Storkan, Javier Andy Zavala Jr., David C Sjöberg, Kate Payne, Peggy Johnson
    Editor: David Nordstrom
    Composer: Giuseppe Andrews

    There’s no sermonising, emotionalising or moralising in its depiction of an electively marginalised man bringing together a band of men and women—many of whom are homeless and/or jobless—to make a rewardingly unfussy film.

    Michael Pattison

    Grolsch Film Works

    Taken together, all this turns Giuseppe Makes a Movie into an awesome documentary. Why? Because it does what the genre does best: it highlights an unknown subject that few would normally know about in a way that makes its exclusion our loss, and its discovery more than a delight.

    Bill Gibron

    PopMatters

    Giuseppe Makes a Movie is one of those rare, down-home gems of a documentary that allows one to experience a preternaturally impassioned soul in his far-out, no-holds barred, milieu.

    The centrifugal power, the galvanizing dynamic that the documenting camera lays frames on is one Giuseppe Andrews, a singular force of jet propulsion, passionately wielding a movie camera as enthusiastically as normal people do a vacation ticket to Cancun. But unlike ordinary people, Giuseppe doesn’t have to escape his circumstances, because he is nothing but his circumstances.

    MARK BORCHARDT

    American Movie

    Unexpectedly, it also unfolds as a moving meditation on creativity, community and the true purpose of art. And Giuseppe emerges as the improbable bastard grandchild of the most radical cinematic positions of the ’60s. An undeniably authentic vision, and of the outré auteurs his work brings to mind—Harmony Korine, the Kuchar brothers, William Eggleston, Andy Warhol and John Waters —it is the last two that have the most resonance.

    Doug Harvey

    Artillery

    This is a weirdly compelling look at a weirdly compelling auteur.

    Gary Goldstein

    Los Angeles Times

    …wisely leaves auteur analysis to the viewer, instead focusing on the concrete benefits of Giuseppe’s practice. The result is an amusing portrait of wayward weirdoes bound together through creative collaboration.
    Carson Lund

    Slant

    Shot in motels and borrowed rooms, the dollar-store productions of Giuseppe Andrews make John Waters’s Pink Flamingos look like Gone With the Wind.

    Nicolas Rapold

    New York Times

    SCREENINGS

    DATESVENUECITYSTATE/COUNTRY
    4-26-14
    4-28-14
    5-4-14    		Hot Docs Film FestivalTorontoCanada
    6-14-14
    6-17-14    		Los Angeles Film FestivalLos AngelesCA
    6-20-14Rooftop FilmsNew YorkNY
    7-1-14New Horizons Film FestivalWrocławPoland
    9-12-14Atlantic Film FestivalHalifaxCanada
    9-19-14
    9-21-14    		PhilaMOCAPhiladelphiaPA
    9-28-14Oakland Underground Film Festival OaklandCA
    10-8-14Festival du Nouveau CinemaMontrealQuebec
    10-10-14Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival Hot SpringsAR
    10-17-14 to
    10-23-14    		Nuart Theatre Los AngelesCA
    10-20-14Hollywood TheaterPortlandOR
    10-21-14Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar AustinTX
    10-27-14Castro TheaterSan FranciscoCA
    11-20-14Houston Cinema Arts Festival HoustonTX
    11-21-14Calgary Underground Film FestivalCalgaryCanada
    1-14-15 to
    1-17-15    		Guild Cinema AlbuquerqueNM
    1-15-15 to
    1-21-15    		Anthology Film Archives New YorkNY
    2-1-15
    2-2-15     		Gene Siskel Film Center ChicagoIL
    3-5-15The CharlesBaltimoreMD
    4-4-15 The Loft Cinema TucsonAZ
    4-7-15 UCLA's Melnitz Movies Los AngelesCA
    4-17-15
    4-18-15
    4-19-15    		UICAGrand RapidsMI
    7-6-15 Cinefamily - VHS Launch Party w/ Bobcat Goldthwait Los AngelesCA
    6-1-18The Castle CinemaLondonUK