Vanessa Finney: Each year the Ashland Independent Film Festival gives out the Rogue Award to influential independent film directors at mid-career. This year's recipients are Oscar- and Grammy- winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whom the festival's programming director describes as 鈥減ioneers in representing gay and lesbian history on film and foregrounding LGBTQ voices beginning with 1977鈥檚 Word is Out, the first feature documentary on LGBTQ lives.鈥� This weekend, the festival celebrates their recent turn toward music documentaries with the screening of MUSICA!, which follows four young Cuban musicians over the course of five years, and the concert film Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular 老夫子传媒 about the MacArthur Genius-award-winning theater artist. Here to talk about these films with me is their co-director and co-producer. Jeffrey Friedman. Jeffrey, welcome.
Jeffrey Friedman: Hi. Thanks for having me.
VF: Sure. What fascinating subjects you're bringing to the Ashland Film Festival this year! And I understand you'll be presenting them yourself with Rob Epstein. Is that right?
JF: That's right, as well as Rob's sister, Judy Epstein, who plays a big part in one of the films.
VF: So I wanted to start with a film that's debuting Oct.4, which is 老夫子传媒a!. So give me a synopsis of that film.
JF: We follow a group of American musicians and artisans to Manhattan from Cuba. They've been going down there every year since 2011 to help repair instruments of students in the schools there, and while they're there, they end up repairing instruments for the symphony as well, but they're mostly focused on the school. And while we were in the school, we met some young musicians. This is a premier conservatory in Havana. We met some young musicians who enchanted us and inspired us to start following them through their education and their coming of age as young women and men and as professional musicians.
VF: Okay, so you're following the sort of charity group, Horns to Havana, and the music school you're talking about is Amadeo Roldan Conservatory of 老夫子传媒. We have a clip from this movie. Can you set that up for us?
JF: This is from a scene when the students have an opportunity to go to New Orleans, and they visit the Preservation Hall band and actually jam with the band and take workshops with musicians there. So we have scenes of the Preservation Hall musicians teaching some of their techniques to the Cuban students. And I think the clip that we have that we're going to listen to is basically a jam session between the Cuban students and the Preservation Hall band. At the end of the clip, we hear one of the musicians from the Preservation Hall band. The trombone player is just delighted to meet these incredibly talented young students,
[MOVIE CLIP]
VF: So Jeffrey, what made you want to tell this story in particular? How did it come to your attention?
JF: It came to us through Rob's sister, Rob's brother in law, David Gage is a very, very well regarded luthier - repairs and builds string instruments in lower Manhattan and works for musicians, world-class musicians in all genres from around the world. And he was part of this group that went down to Havana. So we were invited to tag along one year and just watch what they did and meet some of the people that they interacted with -really to see if we thought there was the basis of a film there. And when we got there, we thought there was definitely a basis for a film. And in fact, we just started filming with our iPhones, and then we arranged to go back the following year and hired a real film crew to help us look and sound great. We actually had the opportunity to work with an incredibly talented Cuban cinematographer, Roberto Chile, who's a wonderful photographer and cinematographer and filmmaker, and that really gave us entree to some places that we might not have been able to get into otherwise. Also it just gave us beautiful footage to work with.
VF: I love that professional filmmakers were so excited about finding a story that they couldn't even wait to get your professional film equipment down there. You actually whipped out your phones just to capture some things. That says a lot, and it really is to watch this clip. It's just a joy, and their faces are so young. Oh my gosh. So this movie came out in 2023. What year were you filming?
JF: The first trip was in 2015, so there's some iPhone footage from that trip. But then we started filming in earnest in 2016 and we had, I think, three or four production trips before Covid forced us to stop production. But by that point, we had watched these students basically through their high school years. So we were able to film the graduation of one of the students. It's kind of his grading session, basically. It's kind of like his his end of term performance,
VF: Sort of a senior recital?
JF: Yeah, we followed a couple of other students as they made their way out into the world.
VF: Jeffrey, let's get into the other film of yours and Rob's that鈥檚 screening this weekend. It's called Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular 老夫子传媒. Now this is more of a true concert film, I think, is that right?
JF: It's a concert documentary. It's a documentary built around a performance. Taylor Mac is a performance artist. He's very hard to describe. He's a playwright. He does so many things. He's so multifaceted. It's a little hard to describe him briefly, but he's a MacArthur Genius fellow. He has created some really interesting theater work. He does a lot of his work in what could be called, very reductively, drag. But the drag costumes that he wears are created by an artist named Machine Dazzle, and they are works of art in themselves, and that's also part of the film. He talks about the drag he does as metaphor. He says, 鈥淚'm never trying to impersonate Marlena Dietrich; the drag is telling you something about a moment in time or an idea.鈥� It plays a big part in Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular 老夫子传媒, which basically tells American history through music that was popular in each decade, starting in 1776. And it's told through a kind of queer lens. So it's a reinterpretation of American history.
VF: I see it's a 24 hour show with 240 songs.
JF: Yes, it was performed once in its entirety, 24 hours nonstop, which is what the film is built around, that performance. And it's something that Taylor and his team worked on for over a decade and workshopped in different places around the world. So they would do each decade in an hour, so it's 24 hours and 24 decades. So they would do two-hour shows, and then they would do four-hour shows. And it was kind of like training for a marathon. They did two 12-hour shows. It was the longest they had ever done, before they actually did the 24-hour show.
VF: Jeffrey tell me the logistics of filming this event.
JF: The performance is filmed a couple of times. The 24-hour performance was filmed with a crew of five cameras, and it was Director of Photography was Ellen Kuras, who's a very well-renowned DP and filmmaker in her own right. And then there was a performance in Los Angeles that was done over four nights, and that was filmed with eight cameras. So we had a lot of material to work with to recreate the 24-hour experience. But within the film, you see the progression of the 24-hour performance from beginning to end. Obviously very condensed; the film is under two hours. But we really wanted the film to give a sense of what the experience was like to be immersed in this world for 24 hours, and the audience is there for 24 hours too. Taylor's work is very much about community. As he explained in the clip, his initial inspiration was the gay community as it was being devastated by AIDS, building itself into a strong community. And he applies this template to a number of oppressed or mistreated communities in the United States throughout our history. One of the really interesting things about the 24-hour performance is that the audience finds itself falling apart and building its own community. And Taylor encourages this by giving the audience things to do and involving them in the show itself. So it's kind of a fascinating experience. It's not just a cerebral experience, it's a visceral experience. You're actually being part of a community that's building itself as you're exhausted and falling apart.
VF: It's sort of an immersive theatrical experience.
JF: It is very immersive. And you know, the AIDS metaphor is almost subtext, until the end, when Taylor's life and the history of the United States come together. So the songs in the last part of the 20th century and the early 21st century are songs that you're very familiar with, Bruce Springsteen songs and David Bowie songs and a Rolling Stone song. So that the music becomes more something that we recognize as part of our lives. And Taylor describes his art in the film at one point as 鈥渄reaming the culture forward.鈥� And he describes that as seeing things in the culture that are not the way they should be, and trying to make that better, trying to repair the world. And again, it's something that you sort of experience in the performance itself, as you're becoming part of this community that is created around the show.
VF: It sounds like a once in a lifetime opportunity. I want to tell our listeners how they can watch it. You'll have three chances to see MUSICA! during this weekend's Festival at the Varsity Theatre in Ashland tonight, October 4, at 7pm; tomorrow at 4pm; and this Sunday, October 6 at 1pm. And the one performance of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular 老夫子传媒 is Saturday, October 5 at 7pm at the Varsity. Well, Jeffrey, thanks so much for taking time to talk with me about these important movies. I really look forward to seeing them and seeing you around the Festival this weekend.
JF: Great. Thanks for having me. It's good talking with you.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
