Co-Presentation with TQFF: "So Pretty"

Images Festival is excited to co-present So Pretty (2019) by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli at the 2019 Toronto Queer Film Festival (TQFF).

Friday, November 8, 7pm 

OCAD University 

100 McCaul St 

Toronto, ON 

M5T 1W1

A German visual artist, Tonia, comes to New York City in 2017, where she meets her American boyfriend, the academic Franz, and works on a new exhibition. Tonia and Franz talk politics, art, and love, go dancing, drink coffee, fuck, protest, and organize alongside their friends, the couple Paul and Erika, a transwoman and musician. When Paul becomes injured by the police following a political action, their social space is momentarily shattered.

Inspired by Ronald M. Schernikau’s German novel so schön, So Pretty marks the feature debut of trans filmmaker Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli. It frankly depicts the lives of four queer youths in Trump-era New York City, struggling to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world, in the process unapologetically documenting the reality of a marginalized community living in a racist, homophobic, and transphobic society. Shot in Brooklyn clubs and apartments by music video director Bill Kirstein (Beyonce’s Life is But a Dream) and featuring a diverse cast of trans and queer relationships, the film recalls the vivid, atmospheric imagery of photographer Larry Clark’s earlier work documenting NYC youth.

An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right wing world, So Pretty moves freely between fictional depiction and semi- documentary, adaptation and translation, looking towards the artistic and personal worlds its characters generate across time and culture as a space for new tensions and potentials.

Born in 1988, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli works as a film director, editor, colourist and critic living in New York. She has directed two feature films, So Pretty, (2019, Berlinale) a literary translation/transposition focusing on gender and the utopian imagination, and Empathy (2016, FID Marseille), a performative documentary following a heroin-addicted escort across the USA.

Tickets are available at sliding scale rates from $5 to $15. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

To book tickets, visit the official program page here.

Image: Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, So Pretty, 2019.