A stranger in a foreign land, with a camera and a penchant for cheap beer: Andrew Hevia’s hyperdigital documentary Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window follows the Miami-bred filmmaker as he visits Hong Kong for the Chinese edition of Art Basel. At first determined to make a traditional documentary accessible for public television audiences, Hevia’s plans are quickly thwarted once he discovers the elusive intricacies of the region. He’s a Cuban-American who can’t understand the language of his new surroundings. Rather than view that as a hindrance, he takes to meeting artists and art collectors, attending art shows, wooing […]
by Erik Luers on Jun 12, 2019The teaser for Kali Kahn’s film, Fairchild, is a murky thing, dark but patchy with light, too, because this is Florida. A young girl, pale and denim-shorted, digs a hole in the dirt, uprooting the tendriled root of a tree in the Everglades. She chews the ends of her hair and her fingers, the way children do, the way teenagers do (she’s both or somewhere in-between). The clearing is saw palmetto green; her nails are blue, bluer still in the soil, on her own shoulder, on her lips. There is neither antecedent nor aftermath for the scene—it’s the film’s trailer, […]
by Monica Uszerowicz on Mar 14, 2019Around the time Miami’s Borscht Diez went down in late February, Black Cinema seemed to take over the world for a second. That was cool; Get Out was all anyone wanted to talk about. The doldrums of the country’s greater ills lifted somewhat during that thriller of a week, in which the Oscar Best Picture winner and the number one movie in America were suddenly, and for the first time ever, directed by African-Americans. That the former had been incubated by the country’s most outlandish short filmmaking outfit, Borscht Corp.— which goes out of its way to produce work by people of […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 20, 2017There are many places to find air conditioning in New York City this weekend, but, if you ask us, you should seek it at the Made in New York Media Center, where IFP’s Screen Forward is mounting a five-night Borscht Corporation retrospective. Borscht, if you don’t know, is the wildly creative, culturally prescient and litigation-inviting collective of Miami filmmakers (and their friends) who are behind some of today’s best short films and certainly one of our best film festivals. Headed by Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer, Borscht produces a semi-annual Miami festival centered around commissioned short films as well as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2015As Borscht 9 — Miami’s delirious cinematic fete comprising afternoons spent in the middle of the ocean, machete fencing and bike rides to the multiverse — hits its midpoint, Borscht Corporation releases to Filmmaker one of its recent short films, Sea Devil. Sea Devil, directed by by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter of Calavera Films, was screened in work-in-progress form at Borscht 8 and now it’s having its online premiere here on the site. Winner of the Bronze Audience Award at Fantasia 2014, Sea Devil is the story of a fisherman smuggling Cuban immigrants into Miami, a mysterious stranger […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 19, 2014