Flight (7 min. 1991) Written and directed by Lester Alfonso, cinematography by Joshua Rikin, featuring Rick Turner. Voice-over added and remastered in 2020. (Available February 27, 2021. Watch the live stream digital world premiere and Q&A at 12:15 PM Saturday afternoon with LA Alfonso, Josh Rifkin, and moderated by Sam Tweedle.)
What a beautiful coincidence; look closely at the photograph. Do you see it? When we pulled out the white sheet from the bag, the fabric showed random folds and creases with an unmistakable likeness to a fiery heart. This white was going to be our projection surface for the world premiere of a long-lost film that never saw the light of day for almost thirty years. I took this for a promising sign.
In September of 2020, I had the honour of being invited to contribute to a little neighbourhood talent show put on by friends who live near Jackson Park. This micro “art festival” started as an informal porch jam attended by a gathering of friends and those randomly passing by. I played a solo ukulele performance in the first edition, and for the fourth, I proposed to screen a seven-minute short film that no one had ever seen before.
The film was my very first collaboration with my dear friend Josh Rifkin. We met in film school, and after discovering a shared love for the film Wings of Desire (1987) directed by Wim Wenders, we decided to produce a kind of poetic homage. We named our nascent film company, Song of Childhood Productions, from the track Lied Vom Kindsein in the soundtrack album that featured actor Bruno Ganz reciting a kind of poem that had the repeating line “when a child was a child..”
Based on a script that I had written, we shot and edited the film according to a storyboard, but we had run out of money before recording the narration, so we left it silent. I only managed to hit PLAY on a separate cassette player for some music at the end-of-year screening. The original roll of the 16-millimetre film ended up, in a bizarre twist, in the hands of director Wim Wenders himself. Josh and I went on a road trip to Montréal from our residence at York University and waited for him to come out of the theatre at his film’s premiere and we forced the film on him.
I rediscovered an old VHS copy of the film and the script for the original voice-narration last year. After thirty years in the vault, I can finally share my initial vision.
The story was told in Sam Tweedle’s Flight: LA Alfonso reflects on his past and future as a storyteller and filmmaker available on his website www.samtweedle.com.
Much of the stories around this film are wanting to be told in person, like I told it to Sam or to the audience for the backyard premiere. I’ve been resisting writing it all down perhaps only for me to realize that there may be other ways to share. I don’t want to write something that sounds like advertising hype. I want to be present and unrehearsed for you to tell the stories.
Join myself, Josh Rifkin, and moderated by Sam Tweedle for a live stream event to watch the digital world premiere of Flight and have a Q&A after the film. Saturday Afternoon, 12:15 PM, February 27, 2021.
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