DEEP RUN is a powerful verité portrait of trans life in rural North Carolina. Exiled by his family and rejected by an ex, 17-year-old Spazz has no one to lean on for support. But when Spazz falls in love again and summons up the courage to become Cole, a strong-willed trans man, his candid humor and steadfast, all-inclusive Christian beliefs counter the bigotry he experiences daily. This intimate documentary reveals rebirth and courage within America’s deeply conservative Bible Belt.
Preceded by PINK BOY by Eric Rockey
PINK BOY an award-winning, intimate 15-minute portrait of a gender-creative boy growing up in conservative rural Florida. Butch lesbian BJ successfully avoided dresses her entire life until she and her partner Sherrie adopted Jeffrey, who to their shock, starts to dance in gowns and perform for his parents. As six-year-old Jeffrey increasingly wishes to dress up in public, BJ must navigate where it is safe for him, from school to a rodeo in Georgia to the ultimate holiday for a pink boy, Halloween. It is a story of love between a butch mother and her feminine son, in one sense opposites, but united by a determination to be who they truly are. Pink Boy had its World Premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK on June 7th, and its North American Premiere at Palm Springs ShortFest on June 18th where it won Best Documentary. Pink Boy has won five awards in total, including Grand Jury Prize for Best Short at DOC NYC.
We are lucky to have Alexandra Juhasz (Professor and Department Chairperson of Film at Brooklyn College) who has a history of working with documentary, social change, and gender politics in the film world and beyond joining Director of DEEP RUN, Hillevi Loven, after the program for discussion.
*SPECIAL LIVESTREAM AFTER THE PROGRAM: PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE*
We are adding a special livestream after the program of the presidential debate.
After the screening we know we all were going to try to rush home or to the nearest bar streaming the debates, so we figured we’d project it here for convenience and to share in watching as a community.
If it’s nice out we’ll move to watch in the backyard, so feel free to stick around to live-tweet with us while it all goes down!
HILLEVI LOVEN is a filmmaker, producer and still photographer based in Brooklyn. She is making her feature-film-directing debut with Deep Run. As a Sundance Documentary Fellow, she took part in the Sundance lab while completing Deep Run. In collaboration with MIT anthropologist Natasha Schull, she co-directed the documentary, Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, which won Best Short from the Society of Visual Anthropology. As an artist, she has received funding and support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Sundance Institute, New York Foundation for the Arts and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her commercial work includes projects for Condé Nast, American Express and Time Inc. She has produced collaborative work with the Brooklyn art collectives UnionDocs, OVO, and the Brooklyn Filmmakers’ Collective. Hillevi is an alumna of Barnard College, and the Hunter College IMA MFA program.
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz teaches, makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and is the author of AIDS TV (Duke, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Media (Minnesota, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth?s Undoing with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011), The Blackwell Companion on Contemporary Documentary with Alisa Lebow (2016), and with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking (forthcoming Duke). She is the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy and the feature films The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about the feminist Internet including YouTube, pedagogy, affect and community. Her personal website is: 
ERIC ROCKEY
