For many years, filmmaker and UVA film professor Kevin Jerome Everson has figured prominently in Charlottesville’s moviemaking community. His experimental films have continually bypassed cinematic conventions in favor of “formal exercises,” he explains. A regular Virginia Film Festival guest, Everson will screen nine shorts on Friday, “all shot this calendar year,” he notes, and marked by his idiosyncratic style.
Everson’s suite of films focuses on disparate subjects, including birdwatchers; a drive-in theater; and a zoologist returning an endangered Puerto Rican crested toad from the Detroit Zoo to its homeland. Conventional Hollywood fare, this is not.
Practice, Practice, Practice meditates on monuments’ removal through its subject, Richard Bradley. “They call him ‘the original monument taker-downer’ because he climbed a flagpole three times to take down a Confederate flag in San Francisco,” Everson says.
The most technically challenging film was Boyd v. Denton, shot at the Ohio State Reformatory in Everson’s hometown, Mansfield, Ohio. The title refers to the 1990 court case that got the reformatory closed for overcrowding and brutal living conditions.
To convey a sense of the prison’s environment, Everson says he shot “a maximum of four frames of 920 cells. … It’s animation—just going 24 frames per second. … It took like six-and-a-half hours to make because I had to walk into every cell,” Everson laughs.
“The Ohio State Reformatory is the highest cellblock on earth: it’s six stories high. … [Filming] it took forever.”
Although these films’ subjects vary wildly, Everson sees a theme that binds his more character-driven pieces. He says, “It’s mostly … just making the invisible visible. Because we always think that things are automatically being done but there’s somebody waking up in the morning and doing these things for the public.”
Through these shorts, Everson wants his audience to come away knowing “that there’s other ways of presenting cinema,” he explains. “There’s other ways of presenting content. It’s not just storytelling—sometimes the situations are pretty good, too. And there’s all kinds of stories being told.”
A Suite of Short Films by Kevin Jerome Everson
October 27 | Violet Crown 5 | With discussion