“25 NEW FACE” JENNIFER VENDITTI AT CINEMA NOLITA TONIGHT WITH BILLY THE KID
As part of a new effort to bring attention to under seen independent films and to support one of New York City’s last independent video stores for specialty films, Hammer to Nail and Cinema Nolita have teamed up to host a series of weekly late night screenings in Nolita’s space on Mulberry St. Tonight at 11pm, Jennifer Venditti, who Filmmaker selected as one of its 25 New Faces in Independent Film in 2007, will be on hand to screen her SXSW Jury prize winning doc Billy the Kid. In a piece for H2N last fall, Cullen Gallagher had this to say about the film:
Unlike the exaggerated characters in even the best high school movies, there’s something unshakably authentic to this fifteen year-old-kid from Brunswick, Maine with a rat tail who wears trucker t-shirts with cut-off sleeves. And it’s not just because Billy the Kid is a work of non-fiction, but rather that director Jennifer Venditti has managed the incredible feat of both finding and conveying cinematically a character who is absolutely singular and unique, and at the same time exists as an “everyman” who sums up our collective adolescence.
While we can deduce that he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, the film smartly never explains this and instead treats Billy like any normal teenager. Billy the Kid refuses to be a disability-movie, instead leaving the varying diagnoses vague and inconclusive, and allowing his eccentricities to be what they are: colorful facets of his complex personality. In fact, the more one tries to pin down Billy’s “uniqueness,” the more one is confronted by how un-unique he really is.
Read the full review at the link.
