Elizabeth Nichols
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“A Film Can Be a Spark, and What Comes After It Is Where the Magic Is”: Elizabeth Nichols on Her True/False-Debuting Flying Lessons
Debuting at True/False (followed by First Look), Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons is a beautiful ode to a New York City Lower East Side artist as well as to the larger “dying breed” that once roamed the streets of Alphabet City, performing in its now extinct clubs. Importantly, it’s also a call to end rampant gentrification and a love story between director and character all rolled into one. The drama began, rather unhappily, with an eviction notice after NYC real estate owner/convicted fraudster Steve Croman bought the building Nichols was living in as a rent-stabilized tenant. Within months the “Bernie Madoff of landlords” had unleashed […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 1, 2024 -
Elizabeth Nichols
In 2010, after living in Boston and San Francisco, Princeton, New Jersey-born Elizabeth Nichols moved to New York’s Lower East Side and immediately felt a sense of liberation. “There was this feeling of being anonymous while also being proximate to so many different human beings,” she says. “I could just watch people all day and hide behind my camera.” Two years later, a notorious New York landlord bought her building and tried to evict her. “It was a poor attempt,” she laughs, “but a very threatening experience.” With her camera, Nichols began attending the meetings of a group of activists, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022
