L for Leisure

Director: Lev Kalman, Whitney Horn

2014 / 74min / DCP

Kalman and Horn’s early ’90s-set episodic ensemble idyll observes the verbal and intellectual acrobatics of otherwise frequently sedentary American graduate students—the cast includes filmmakers Mati Diop, Benjamin Crotty, and Gabriel Abrantes—seen on 10 different sun-kissed vacation breaks in locations ranging from Baja, Mexico, to Aix-en-Provence, shot on 16mm with 4:3 framing and faded postcard colors and sweetened by the synth swaths of John Atkinson’s score. Topics addressed in this floating salon include Marky Mark’s Calvin Klein campaign, Tree Spirits, the “End of History,” “psychedelic sports,” and still other esoterica, in a luminous—yet quietly anxious—invocation of the dawning Clinton Era.

Intro by filmmakers Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn on Friday, November 15th