Danielle Lessovitz

Danielle Lessovitz is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for Port Authority, a queer feature film that premiered at Cannes's Un Certain Regard in 2019.[1] She typically casts non-actors in her films, and focuses on marginalized communities.

Danielle Lessovitz
Born
San Francisco, California, United States
OccupationDirector, producer, screenwriter
Known forPort Authority (2019)

Early and personal life

Lessovitz is from San Francisco and Kansas City, but is based in New York City. She has a degree in documentary film from Northwestern University, and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, for which she was awarded a scholarship to study.[2] Her professor here was Ira Sachs.[3] She works as a professor of filmmaking at Rutgers University.[4]

She identifies as a queer woman. Lessovitz uses female pronouns and sees herself as "quite genderless", explaining: "gender [is] a sort of weird thing for me, because I don't necessarily feel one way or another".[4] She is Jewish.[5]

Career

Lessovitz is part of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.[2] She has said that she got into filmmaking as "a way to be honest about what [she] was seeing and experiencing, [she] wanted a way to make sense of very complex feelings and to communicate those as best [she] could", comparing filmmaking to poetry and painting.[3] Lessovitz's films typically depict marginalized communities and star non-actors.[6]

She directed her first short film, Batteries, in 2009, and followed this with the 2012 short The Earthquake, which won awards in Philadelphia and Kansas City, and Neon Heartache, a 2013 short that also played the festival circuit.[7] She wrote The Earthquake in 2010 after reading about Haitian communities in Queens experiencing loss from afar after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, setting the film in Brooklyn;[8] she won the Ben Lazeroff award for screenwriting for it.[2] Her first film shown at Cannes Film Festival was 2017's Vladimir de Fontenay-directed Mobile Homes, which she co-executive produced (with Charles de Rosen) and co-wrote (with de Fontenay).[3][4][9] Eric Kohn for IndieWire said that for Mobile Homes, Lessovitz "burrows inside a persecuted world without pandering to it".[10]

In 2019, TheWrap included her in their list of the top 16 directors at Cannes Film Festival, which also featured names such as Pedro Almodóvar, Werner Herzog and Agnès Varda.[11] Her film at the festival this year was Port Authority, her directorial debut feature film set in the New York ball subculture and telling the love story of a black trans woman and a homeless white man. It stars Fionn Whitehead and Leyna Bloom, who became the first black trans actress to star as lead in a film at the festival.[1][12] The film was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who Lessovitz said she was scared to reveal the final product to,[13] explaining that "to feel like you have one of the most if not the most important American auteurs opening up his wisdom and his mentorship to you is surreal".[4]

Taylor B. Hinds for I AM FILM wrote that Lessovitz "displaces the ... white-male role to the outskirts of the queer culture" in the film, also forcing Whitehead's character Paul to rediscover his sexuality and masculinity while engulfed in the ball scene.[13] Lessovitz has said that she knew of ball culture from having seen Paris Is Burning as a film student, but did not know that it was still around in the 2010s until she was invited to one while in a crisis after her father's suicide; watching people vogueing gave her "respite" in this time, and speaking to drag families helped her gain a fresh understanding of family structures.[12] The character of Paul has several parallels with Lessovitz, but she explains that his male privilege is explored in the film, something she has never experienced, and that he is used to explore forms of masculinity from this perspective.[12]

The film also confronts Paul's identity as a white person, something that IndieWire's Jude Dry said Lessovitz "clearly gave a lot of thought"; interviewed by the outlet from Cannes, she said:

We need to have conversations, especially as white allies ... How do we tell these stories that are important to us and relevant to us? How do we do it in a way that's consistent with the deeper humanity that runs through all of us? And we need to have a middle ground where we're not working in a space that's commercial or fetishistic and sort of wanting to exploit or profit off of the beautiful cultural contributions of a class of marginalized people.[4]

Kohn said that Lessovitz's "ability to address the drama's specific hook in measured terms enables this scrappy little movie to strike a quietly progressive note".[10]

References
  1. Pond, Steve (May 18, 2019). "'Port Authority' Film Review: Searching for Family in New York's LGBT Ball Scene". TheWrap. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  2. "Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective – Danielle Lessovitz". Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  3. Berger, Laura. "Cannes 2019 Women Directors: Meet Danielle Lessovitz – "Port Authority"". Women and Hollywood. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  4. Dry, Jude (May 22, 2019). "How Martin Scorsese Helped Tender Trans Romance 'Port Authority' Get to Cannes". IndieWire. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  5. "New Filmmakers Weekend to Honor Three Jewish Directors". pjvoice.org. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  6. "Danielle Lessovitz". DCTV NY. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  7. "Neon Heartache". Torino Film Fest. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  8. "The Earthquake". Torino Film Fest. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  9. Hunter, Allan. "'Mobile Homes': Cannes Review". Screen Daily. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  10. Kohn, Eric (May 18, 2019). "Martin Scorsese-Produced Trans Drama 'Port Authority' Is Quietly Progressive — Cannes Review". IndieWire. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  11. "16 of Cannes' Hottest Directors, From Pedro Almodóvar to Céline Sciamma (Exclusive Photos)". TheWrap. May 14, 2019. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  12. Hyams, Rosslyn (September 25, 2019). "Cinefile September 2019 – Port Authority, Du Sable et du Feu". RFI. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  13. Hinds, Taylor B. (November 29, 2019). "Five Filmmakers to Watch in 2019". I AM FILM. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
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