Filmmakers trace William Faulkner’s complicated southern identity in Faulkner: The Past is Never Dead. Image courtesy of VAFF.
Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner arrived at the University of Virginia more than 60 years ago to begin his tenure as the first writer-in-residence. During his time in Charlottesville, Faulkner visited English classes, kept office hours, worked on his novel The Mansion, and left a lasting impact on the area’s literary, and wine, scene (His descendants own and run Knight’s Gambit Vineyard in Crozet.)
Faulkner: The Past is Never Dead, a new documentary from director Michael Modak-Truran, explores the life and work of the renowned-yet-flawed literary figure. Using a variety of storytelling techniques, including interviews, archival photographs, and newspaper images, the film immerses viewers in Faulkner’s world, paying special attention to his sometimes paradoxical words on race.
“Faulkner’s ‘unflinching gaze’ dissected issues of race relations, equality, and civil rights—themes that continue to resonate today,” says the doc’s Executive Producer Anita Modak-Truran, who speaks at this year’s Virginia Film Festival. “Faulkner’s relevance is painfully obvious. The issues of race and change that animated Faulkner’s writing were, and are, at the forefront of the American zeitgeist.”
Though Faulkner is frequently lauded for his at-the-time progressive views about Black Americans and racial equality in his writing, he sometimes made racist remarks. Modak-Truran says the documentary avoids presenting Faulkner through a revisionist history lens, and instead lets viewers untangle the good and the bad for themselves.
What sets The Past is Never Dead apart from other documentaries is its captivating reenactments, historical locations, and original score. The camera follows Faulkner through five decades, and steps inside real haunts from his past, including his Mississippi home Rowan Oak. When casting an actor to play the writer, filmmakers landed on Academy Award-nominee Eric Roberts.
“It gave me chills watching Eric from the set monitor navigating a spectrum of emotions,” says Modak-Truran. “[He] cracked through the contemplative Faulkner’s surface and traveled to internal places we may not want to see, like when he tells his daughter Jill, that ‘no one remembers Shakespeare’s child.’ It’s like a gut punch. Eric makes Faulkner’s words his own. His narration, in particular, is so richly nuanced that it lulls us into the heart of a troubled soul who is trying to understand the world around him.”
Known as one of the foremost authors in the Black Arts Movement, poet Nikki Giovanni has published political and inspirational work since the 1960s. Supplied photo.
This year’s Virginia Film Festival features Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a new documentary that chronicles the life, work, and enduring legacy of the titular poet. Going to Mars has already garnered much buzz: At its Sundance premiere earlier this year, the film received the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary award.
Produced and directed by Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster, the film features Giovanni’s poetry, which has enjoyed the popular spotlight for over half a century, overlaid by captivating visuals as well as archival footage. Going to Mars places Giovanni’s work in the context of historical events, social movements—from the Black Arts Movement to Black Lives Matter—and the poet’s personal life. This contextualization illustrates how Giovanni’s appeal is rooted in her ability to weave the political and personal into deeply evocative poems. Ahead of the festival, C-VILLE Weekly had the opportunity to ask Nikki Giovanni a few questions.
C-VILLE: Many folks—including myself—are so looking forward to viewing Going to Mars. Could you talk about what the filmmaking process was like for you? How much were you able to contribute to the artistic vision of the project?
Nikki Giovanni: Mostly I tried to stay out of the way. My contribution was already [there], so I wanted Michèle and Joe to create from my thoughts and creations. I must add I was thrilled at how they used the future with history, which is pretty much how I think.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. Image courtesy of VAFF.
You are well known for writing poems that reach across generations, chronicling family and societal histories. What impact do you hope this film might have on writers, especially Black poets, who view it now and in the future?
If I could compare this documentary to any other film I would say The Godfather. The history and the love and the acceptance of duty are, I hope, in it.
What excites you most about where American poetry is today?
The voice of Black Americans has continually evolved. We are now at rap but another tone is coming. People all over are writing and reading poetry. There are festivals and there are classes. Wow! A lot of folk used to not even know about poetry who are now a part of its growth.
You’ve talked elsewhere about your quest not to let the world negatively influence you. At a time when so much is happening, and news of these happenings is so readily available to us 24/7, what helps you maintain that inner sanctum?
I avoid what I believe is called social media. I never argue to, at, or with people for whom I have no intellectual respect. I have a great belief in the strength of our ancestors who passed their wisdom along through The Spirituals. I prefer happiness.
Ricardo Preve reflects on his arrival in Charlottesville in Sometime, Somewhere, which will have its world premiere at the Virginia Film Festival. Image courtesy of VAFF.
Things have changed a lot since Ricardo Preve arrived at the bus station in Charlottesville in 1977 without money or a passport. There weren’t many Latinos in town then, and he found the locals welcoming, if ignorant about Latin America.
“It was so easy to become a citizen in the ’80s,” recalls Preve. When he became eligible for American citizenship, his boss called his congressman, who called a federal judge, and Preve was sworn in the next day. “I think the whole process took 48 hours from beginning to end.”
Now, he says, there’s no path to citizenship, and the current waiting time for a Mexican is 22 years.
“I feel the attitude toward foreigners has changed,” says Preve, who was born in Argentina. He cites September 11, 2001, January 6, 2021, and August 12, 2017, as “moments that exacerbated and brought out things that may have been here, but were hidden.”
His latest film, Sometime, Somewhere, is “a reflection on my past after being in this town for 45 years,” he says. He uses Charlottesville to tell the story, not only of contemporary migrants, but of this country’s history of immigration.
Preve had an advantage many immigrants don’t have. His aunt, Countess Judith Gyurky, also an immigrant who fled Hungary during World War II, established a horse farm in Batesville. “They received me with open arms,” he recalls.
In Preve’s film, the forced migration of African Americans is remembered by Jamaican-born Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, at the University of Virginia’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers.
The Irish also play a part in the local immigration story. Fleeing the potato famine, they built the Blue Ridge Tunnel in the 1850s. And on Heather Heyer Way, Preve films where white supremacy took off its mask.
Preve links The Grapes of Wrath’s Joads, who were escaping the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, to the immigrant experience. “Substitute Garcia or Gonzales for Joad, and it’s the same story,” he says. “This is a repeating story in American history. People are exploited and they’re considered less than human.”
Preve didn’t ask about the immigration status of the people he interviews in the film, some of whom he found through Sin Barreras—Without Barriers—an organization that supports the Hispanic community.
“At first, people were worried I was undercover ICE,” he says. Then they heard his Argentinian-accented Spanish. “The rest of Latin America finds it amusing,” he explains. “It’s like a person from Alabama going to New York City. They realized we could not be undercover.”
The migrants and the immigration attorneys he talks to paint a dire picture of how the decisions to come to America are made.
“If you’re facing execution or starvation or rape, your choice is to either accept your fate or cross the border,” he says. “It is a death sentence to be a 15-year-old Salvadoran boy and the MS-13 says ‘either you join or die.’” Same for a young woman tapped to be a gang girlfriend.
He gave all the migrants the option to remain anonymous, and he was a little surprised at the number who gave their names. “I think that reflects a need for people to be humanized,” says Preve.
Preve, 66, made a career change in the early 2000s, moving from agroforestry to filmmaking. One of his earliest documentaries, Chagas: A Hidden Affliction, brought attention to a rampant disease that’s pretty much unheard of in the United States. Since then, he’s made almost 30 productions for television and film, most recently, From Sudan to Argentina.
Sometime, Somewhere is a more personal film for Preve. He tells film students at Light House Studio to pick a story they’re uniquely qualified to tell. “Immigrating from Latin America to Charlottesville is something I was uniquely qualified to tell,” he says.
And this story came with a special perk. “I got to sleep at home every night,” he says. “It was wonderful to stay in my hometown and shoot a film here.”
Shot on 16mm film in Charlottesville, Danny Wagner’s For the Taking fuses a homegrown heist plot with a cast of varied acting experience. Image courtesy of VAFF.
Danny Wagner knows he’s a baby in the modern movie biz.
The young filmmaker has worked as a production assistant for major television studios on shows like “Young Sheldon” and as a production coordinator on multiple feature films. But he says he’s still “not there yet” when it comes to making it in Hollywood.
Wagner’s own first feature film, For the Taking, could be the break he’s been looking for. The movie will premiere at the Virginia Film Festival on Sunday.
“The Virginia Film Festival is the first film festival I ever knew, and getting to have our world premiere there is in some ways a climax,” Wagner says. “Its reputation is prestigious, but it also gives movies like ours that are made in the area a chance to shine in a larger venue.”
Wagner, a Charlottesville native and UVA grad, has filmmaking in his blood. Both his parents are documentarians, and he began learning about producing movies when he was “in the single digits.”
The single digits wasn’t so long ago for Wagner—he graduated from UVA in 2018—and his passion for cinema has persisted over the past two decades. He found his voice as an actor in school productions and at Live Arts, and while the university doesn’t have a film department or offer a filmmaking major, Wagner cut his teeth in the media studies department with a film theory concentration and by taking on internships. A work-study he completed with casting and production agency arvold. was particularly enlightening, he says.
“That was an amazing way to understand the film scene not just in Virginia, but along the East Coast and Eastern Seaboard,” Wagner says. “I made a reel of the actors they had in big projects—‘House of Cards,’ ‘Turn,’ and others—and all the talent they had helped cultivate in Virginia really opened my eyes.”
Wagner says For the Taking, a 77-minute heist flick, was a happy accident of the 2020 pandemic. The emerging filmmaker and then-Los Angeles resident was forced back to his hometown of Charlottesville when work dried up. Staying in touch with other industry folks in Virginia, New York, L.A., and beyond, he hatched an idea: Write a script about a guy down on his luck and forced into a caper, cast two unknowns as lead actors, bring in more experienced thespians to guide the newbies, and film the whole thing in rustic 16mm.
The result is an eccentric movie with a raw edge that Wagner believes he was only able to capture using a couple guys new to the silver screen.
“I got really excited about the idea of capturing their little idiosyncratic mistakes to create natural moments,” the filmmaker says. “And I think the natural occurrences make you feel excited for them to succeed. It has been a long, rocky process to get it finished, but it does live by that principle—a spontaneous, authentic, and organic set of characters.”
Wagner also sees For the Taking’s homemade quality as a plus in modern distribution. Could he move the film over to YouTube at some point? Cut the whole thing up and turn it into TikToks? Take it on the road and show it outdoors on projectors? He’s open to anything if it means more people see his movie.
“For the Taking has only taken my money so far, but everyone who has worked on this film has equity in it, and if the film succeeds, we all succeed,” Wagner says. “We all see it as a stepping stone, and I am really happy with what we made. It’s breezy, authentic, and heartfelt. I think there’s an audience for it.”
Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Courtesy Jason McDonald/Netflix.
A decade-spanning love story, a curmudgeonly prep school teacher’s Christmas break, a musical documentary—the 2023 Virginia Film Festival features a variety of moving, lyrical, and laugh-out-loud cinema across its 120-plus programs.
The festival takes place from October 25–29 at various theaters around Charlottesville, opening with Bradley Cooper’s highly-anticipated Maestro, which focuses on the relationship between Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
“Opening with Maestro is deeply meaningful,” says VAFF Director and UVA Vice Provost for the Arts Jody Kielbasa, who staged Bernstein’s Mass in 2018 as part of a UVA creative team that included Michael Slon and Bob Chapel.
Riley Keough. Photo by Jeff Vespa/@portraits.
Challenged by the strikes in Hollywood, the VAFF team faced limitations in terms of bringing in big name actors, but you’d never know it from the stellar lineup of speakers and performers, which includes director Ava DuVernay (Origin), actor and director Riley Keough (War Pony), and acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project).
The Festival concludes with American Symphony, a documentary that follows musician Jon Batiste for a year, during which his longtime partner, bestselling author Suleika Jaouad, learns her leukemia has returned after ten years in remission.
Batiste, who Kielbasa describes as “an extraordinary artist on every level,” will briefly perform following a post-screening discussion.
Jon Batiste in American Symphony. Courtesy of Netflix.
Other documentary highlights include the world premiere of Argentine filmmaker Ricardo Preve’s Sometime, Somewhere, an exploration of the journeys and struggles of Latino immigrants in Charlottesville, and The Space Race, a deep dive into the untold experiences of the inaugural Black pilots, scientists, and engineers of NASA. Astronaut, UVA alum, and film subject Leland Melvin appears.
Descendant. All images courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.
Descendant
The United States outlawed international slave trade in 1808, but more than a halfcentury later a ship called the Cotilda smuggled a group of enslaved Africans into Mobile, Alabama. The expedition was illegally chartered by a plantation owner named Timothy Meaher, who ordered the Cotilda be burned and sunk to hide all evidence of his crime.
Now, most of the descendants of the Cotilda have settled in Africatown, a small community just north of Mobile. Margaret Brown’s documentary, Descendant, follows residents of Africatown as they come together to search for the Clotilda, reclaim their ancestors’ narrative, and demand accountability. A discussion with subject Kern Jackson and moderator Robert Daniels follows the screening. November 5, Violet Crown Cinema
Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting
Despite the ongoing movement to remove the use of harmful and exploitativestereotypes of Native Americans from the sporting world, appropriation of Native American culture still runs rampant. While teams like the Washington Commanders and the Cleveland Guardians made tardy name changes, others, like the Chicago Blackhawks and the Atlanta Braves, cling to their reductive imagery.
In Imagining the Indian, directors Ben West and Aviva Kempner chronicle the movement to end the use of Native American logos, mascots, slurs, and names. A discussion with Kempner, documentary subject Rhonda LeValdo, and moderator Adriana Greci Green accompanies the screening. November 6, Violet Crown Cinema
Dani’s Twins
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dani Izzie became one of the first quadriplegics to give birth to twins. Dani’s Twins follows the Madison County resident as she navigates her unique pregnancy, grapples with biases faced by women with disabilities, gives birth to her children at UVA Medical Center, and begins the journey of parenthood.
A discussion with producer Angie Gentile, subjects Dani and Rudy Izzie, and Dr. Robert Fuller is moderated by Eric Swensen, and accompanies the screening. The documentary will be presented with open captions, and on-stage presentations will include ASL interpretation. November 3, Culbreth Theatre
Hazing
Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the history and culture of hazing with sensitivity andcare in his new documentary. “As a filmmaker who is a fraternity member (I am a proud member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Incorporated) and someone who has been hazed and has hazed young men, I feel uniquely qualified to make this film,” says Hurt.
Hurt examines the sometimes-deadly practice from all sides, conducting heartfelt interviews with survivors and families who’ve lost loved ones, while also delving into issues of systemic racism, toxic masculinity, and groupthink culture. Hurt will discuss the film with subject James Vivenzio and moderator Angie Miles. November 4, Vinegar Hill Theatre
Eternal Spring
Whimsical, exhilarating, and ominous, Eternal Spring is not your average doc. Told through alternating present-day footage, first-person recounts, and 3D animation, the official Oscar-selected flick follows comic book illustrator Daxiong, a member of outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong. In an attempt to counter the government’s narrative about its spiritual practice, Falun Gong hijacks a state TV station, forcing Daxiong to flee the country. Now, 20 years later, Daxiong sets out to retrace the events of the hijacking through his artwork, but finds his views challenged by another surviving hijacker. November 5, Violet Crown Cinema
Justin Black will participate in a discussion of his film, Headwaters Down, which screens on
November 6 at Culbreth Theatre. Images courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.
Justin Black grew up on the James River and didn’t realize some people thought it was “disgusting,” including two friends he met at the University of Virginia. Years later, the three paddled 250 miles down the James—and made a documentary.
Black, Will Gemma, and Dietrich Teschner had never made a film before. What they had done was paddle parts of the James with two other friends. The five decided to embark in three camera-laden canoes from the headwaters in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers converge.
In the course of the 13-day journey to Richmond, they were threatened with a gun, lost a boat, and endured soaking rain. And they saw the best—and the worst—of the James River.
The result is Headwaters Down with three co-directors. Black, a musician, did the soundtrack, Gemma, who studied poetry at UVA, narrates, and Teschner, an actor, is the film’s editor.
“We had no budget,” says Black. “We had our own cameras. We had boats. Everybody paid their own way.”
Justin Black.
Local documentarian Paul Wagner will moderate the November 6 Headwaters screening panel. “What struck me and I found so pleasurable is when you get to the credits and you realize the guys who are in it filmed it, edited it, did the sound,” he says. “I just love this idea of adventuring down the river and into documentary filmmaking.”
“We didn’t know it was going to be a feature film,” says Black. “We did a ton of research, but we didn’t know things were going to happen.”
In hindsight, the encounter with the possibly drug-crazed gun-toting guy who didn’t want to share camping space on an island was a gift, says Black. “We had a climax in Act 1.”
The James River was once considered one of the most polluted waterways in America. Its health has improved, but it still faces peril, from Dominion Energy power plants, excessive damming that makes 25 miles of the river unnavigable, and both industrial and agricultural runoff. As recently as July 2022, the Virginia Department of Health issued a recreational water advisory to refrain from swimming, wading, tubing, and whitewater kayaking after a ruptured pipe allowed 300,000 gallons of raw, undiluted sewage to reach parts of the James.
The crew started in the crystal-clear water of the Cowpasture River—until it converged with the Jackson River and turned black. A paper mill on the Jackson is allowed to discharge certain dyes, says Black. “But it’s really jarring to see the change and 12 miles of blackish-brown water.”
Tires have been tossed into the James apparently for as long as the rubber has hit the road. The James River Association has removed thousands, says Black, but they still litter a section of the upper river.
Yet there’s also the great blue heron, the catch-of-a-lifetime musky, the historic Kanawha Canal and the beauty of floating down a river. “What comes through thematically is their joy in navigating the river and how important it is to preserve it,” says Wagner.
The screening at Culbreth Theatre is a “full circle moment” for the three friends to return to UVA 11 years after their graduation, he says. “We’re guest lecturing on the power of storytelling and the environment.”
And they’re planning a sequel and traveled from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay in June to complete the entire 348 miles of the James.
“A big part of this is to encourage people to take their own adventures in their own backyards,” says Black.
Eugenio Caballero will discuss his work with Carlos Aguilar following a screening of Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths at Culbreth Theatre on November 5. Image courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.
You don’t forget Eugenio Caballero’sproduction designs. There’s the otherworldly Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Academy Award. There’s the black-and-white Mexico City in Roma, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. And his most recent efforts in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be screened at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.
Caballero will also be presented with the film fest’s first Craft Award, which recognizes a distinguished and outstanding practitioner of behind-the-scenes craft.
A production designer is “the artist hired to create everything you see in the environment that the actors inhabit on screen,” explains film critic Carlos Aguilar, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wrap, and who is the festival’s first critic-in-residence.
“I think [Caballero] is an incredible artist with a talent for creating worlds that either existed in the past or that are sort of fantastical,” says Aguilar.
Caballero has worked with Mexico’s three most renowned directors: Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Iñárritu.
Aguilar’s review of Bardo for The Wrap describes Caballero as “a magician dexterous at turning places long frozen in the directors’ unreliable memory tangible once more for the screen.”
Says Aguilar, “In Roma, he basically brought to life the Mexico City of the ’70s and Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood home.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, “he built the magical world Guillermo had envisioned that is really striking.”
Pan’s Labyrinth had “very strict rules with colors and shapes,” says Caballero in a podcast called Decorating Pages. The filmmaker chose a cold palette for the reality of Franco’s Spain, and a warm palette for the fantasy “that’s supposed to be scary, but at the end it’s a refuge or shelter for this girl,” he says. The furniture was built to be a little bigger. “We really wanted to change the scale.”
Aguilar notes Caballero’s “incredible attention to detail in painstakingly bringing to life these worlds. In Roma, making it seem organic and natural, not artificial, is part of the magic he does.”
Dustin Lance Black appears at From Page to Screen: Screenwriter’s Panel on November 5 at the Code Building’s Irving Theater, and for a Q&A at the screening of Mama’s Boy at the Culbreth Theatre on November 6. Images courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.
Writer/director/producer Dustin Lance Black’s films and television work—including his Academy Award-winning Milk script—are frequently outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. The Mormon Church also resurfaces throughout his work, as in the hit FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” The two topics merge in director Laurent Bouzereau’s new documentary Mama’s Boy, which focuses on Black and his late mother, Anne. And they’re more deeply personal than ever.
Black, 48, half-jokingly calls the film “This Is Your Life and Mostly the Painful Bits.” Working from Black’s memoir Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, Bouzereau follows him as they retrace his experiences growing up gay among strict Mormons in Texas. There, homosexuality was considered venal, and he was terrified to reveal his true self. Meanwhile, Black’s resilient mother bravely lived with polio. Mama’s Boy explores how his coming out to her revealed her extraordinary gift for compassion.
An Instagram DM from Bouzereau concerning Black’s book led to their collaboration. Black was already aware of Bouzereau from his film-related documentaries, and was “very interested” in working with him. As they became acquainted, Black discovered that “to know Laurent is to love Laurent. … It’s easy to trust him. And I do feel that that trust was well placed.”
Dustin Lance Black.
Black wrote his memoir “from the safety of my home now as a grown man,” he points out. But facing his tough childhood memories on camera—particularly where they occurred—was another matter. “I would imagine many a therapist would say it’s incredibly bad therapy,” he says.
Black stresses that he deliberately didn’t write, produce, or direct Mama’s Boy: “I hate it when I watch documentaries and then at the end it says ‘directed by’ or ‘produced by’ the person who was just featured because then you don’t necessarily trust it.”
“This is my mom’s story more than mine,” he says, “and I feel like the lessons that I learned from her are vital now—are even more necessary now than when she shared these lessons with me when she was still around.”
Despite her background, Black’s mother not only accepted her son’s sexual orientation, but his friends’, as well. He was moved, he says, “to see how a conservative military Mormon woman showed the courage back in the ’90s to share space with a bunch of my queer friends … who she had been taught her whole life were immoral and illegal and hellbound. … And [show] the curiosity to listen. And we found common ground.”
Eventually, he recalls, she “challenged me to do the same in the other direction. And it’s not easy. … But what you find is you can build a bridge because you still do, for the most part, have more in common than what the 24-hour news channels and the newspapers would claim.”
Black hopes the film will encourage greater civility and humaneness, especially in the current climate of intense political polarization. “Perhaps we can just learn to live and let live a little bit more,” he says. “That’s the way we’ve kept the country together for nearly a quarter of a millennium. Are we going to make it any further? Not if we keep on like this.”
Looking back, Black says, “Everything I do in my activism is for that next generation so they don’t have to grow up having their adolescence spoiled by homophobia. … Frankly, we’ve already lived our youth. We’ve already survived those years, thank God.
“It’s really not for us, is it? It’s all for that next generation. That’s why we do it.”
Virginia native Jamie Sisley will receive the Governor Gerald L. Baliles Founder's Award at the November 4 screening of Stay Awake, his movie about a family's struggles with a mother's addiction. Photo: Eze Amos.
With a prime-time Virginia film fest screening at the Paramount Theater, the movie Stay Awake has made longtime Charlottesville resident Jamie Sisley an indie-festival darling again.
Sisley first produced Stay Awake, which chronicles a family’s struggles with a mother’s addiction, in 2015 as an award-winning short. After securing Best Narrative Short honors at the Slamdance Film Festival, the picture went on to be nominated for another award at the acclaimed Berlin International Film Festival.
Now, Sisley is back with a full-length version of the movie, a semi-autobiographical story drawing on the UVA grad’s childhood in Chantilly and Leesburg near the well-known drug trafficking corridor along Interstate 81.
But, as Sisley considers the geographic touchpoints that have made him who he is today, he focuses not on his more rural place of birth and early life, but rather on Charlottesville.
“I did most of my growing up in Charlottesville,” he says. “I have an almost obnoxious affinity for my home state … and the Virginia Film Festival was such an education for me. It brought films and people to contextualize those films in a way that really opened my mind.”
Stay Awake, starring Fin Argus and Wyatt Oleff, screens at the Paramount Theater on November 4. Image courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.
While earning his business degree from the McIntire School of Commerce, Sisley heard a Red Light Management rep was speaking at James Madison University. He skipped class, drove to Harrisonburg, and sat in a JMU classroom as Randy Reed talked about what it meant to be an artist manager. He asked Reed if he could join the agency as an intern. He got the gig.
Sisley says his time at Red Light started it all—his desire to work in the arts, his understanding of the way business and creativity could mingle, how artists could find their voice, and what it meant to be the kind of leader he’d have to be to someday sit in the director’s chair.
“Red Light was probably the greatest and luckiest opportunity I’ve ever gotten,” Sisley says. “It was a master class in business, but it was more than that. Coran [Capshaw] really brought the best out of me, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how he did that and trying to replicate it on set.”
While working at Red Light, Sisley began watching movies in bunches—titles by Fellini and Bergman and Carlos Reygadas. He bought a book about directing by Nick Proferes. He teamed up with another local filmmaker, Miguel Martinez, and applied for a PBS grant to make a documentary. Against all odds, Sisley and Martinez won the funding.
Next for Sisley was film school at Columbia University. While in New York, he also worked on his funded documentary, Farewell Ferris Wheel, which followed Mexican migrants in the U.S. carnival industry. Absorbing theory in the classroom while shooting and budgeting for the doc was like “going to film school twice,” he says.
Sisley released the 14-minute version of Stay Awake as his capstone grad school project in 2015, and Farewell Ferris Wheel in 2016 after seven years of production.
It was on Stay Awake’s first festival circuit run that Sisley decided to write and direct a full-length. So many people approached him to talk about their own issues with addiction—and their family members’ issues.
“I didn’t want to make another film about addiction,” Sisley says. “It takes a lot out of you from the writing side.” But make it, he did.
Stay Awake is different from most addict pics because it focuses on the caregiver, Sisley says. The angle has resonated—both with star talent and critics. Chrissy Metz of “This Is Us” fame took on the role of the mother battling addiction, and the film made it back to the Berlin festival for its world premiere, this time being nominated for four awards. It won two of them. Variety called Stay Awake “especially resonant,” and IndieWire said it was a “sensitive drama [that] illustrates a key truth about addiction: It doesn’t only affect one person, but sucks everyone around into its vortex.” With some reservations, the reviewer went on: “It’s an earnest look at the collateral damage surrounding addiction.”
In addition to Metz, Wyatt Oleff headlines the Stay Awake cast as Ethan, one of two brothers trying desperately to handle their mother’s drug use.
“Stay Awake was an unforgettable experience with an excellent cast and crew who bonded together like a real family,” Oleff says about working with Sisley. “Such a great team to tell such an important and impactful story, and there’s not one thing about it that I would’ve changed.”
Oleff had a major role in the two-part 2017 adaptation of the Stephen King novel It and a minor role in Guardians of the Galaxy. Fin Argus, a multi-talent artist whose biggest role was on Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” rounds out the cast as Derek, the film’s second dogged brother.
At the screening, Sisley will receive another honor, the festival’s own Governor Gerald L. Baliles Founder’s Award, which recognizes “excellence in Virginia filmmaking and honors an exceptional filmmaker who has roots in Virginia or prominently spotlights Commonwealth locales, history, and culture.” Discussion of Stay Awake will follow, featuring Metz and Oleff in addition to Sisley. USA Today’s Brian Truitt will moderate.
The post-screening discussion is certain to hit on addiction, still a significant and growing problem in the commonwealth. Opioid overdoses in Virginia increased by one-third from 2019 to 2022, as measured by emergency department visits.
Sisley hopes his film humanizes the folks who struggle. “In the vast majority of the films I saw growing up … addicts were demonized,” he says.
The filmmaker says he still has so much love for his mother, who is doing well handling her own addiction. But the battle continues. “She would be the first to say that it is a daily struggle,” Sisley says. “I don’t think you’re ever cured of addiction.”
