Since its January 2005 premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, this innovative feature film has played a pivotal role in renewing debate about the need for a suicide barrier on The Golden Gate Bridge. The Joy of Life has taken home awards from both the New York and Los Angeles Lesbian & Gay Film Festivals, and has been praised by critics for its unique style and dynamic vision.
The Joy of Life combines stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voiceover (performed by LA-based artist/actor Harriet "Harry" Dodge) to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as a suicide landmark, and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery.
The two stories are punctuated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's beautiful reading of his ode to San Francisco, "The Changing Light" and bookended by opening and closing credits music from legendary '50s icon (and probable Golden Gate suicide) Weldon Kees.
The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional.
GreenCine Says:
The Joy of Life (2005; $18.10). Filmmaker Jenni Olson told GreenCine's Tamara Lees: "I want to convey a sense of time and place and history. The underlying agenda of the film is to create a visual document of the changing face of San Francisco... It's also my hope that audiences will be inspired by the film's form and bring this way of looking at the world with them when they leave the theater." Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti approved: "I was joyed," he told her in an e-mail. The film "makes the ordinary extraordinary" (Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe).
With her award-winning first feature, The Joy of Life [now out on DVD], touring the west coast (the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the Rialto in Santa Rosa), Tamara Lees asked filmmaker Jenni Olson about its making - from the original concept through to the last-minute transfer before its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. Full article >>
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