Kevin Jerome Everson

Double Feature at the Sunset Drive-In

A young man walks through the lot of a drive-in theatre on the day of a double feature.

Richland Descending

Richland Descending is based on a Gerhard Richter painting and the stag films produced in Mansfield, Ohio in the late 1960s.

Air Force Two

Kevin Jerome Everson’s unique observational gaze collapses Hollywood histrionics and American carceral history into one frame, as a Moscow prison break scene from Andrew Marlowe’s original screenplay for Air Force One—read in affectless voiceover on the film’s soundtrack—is offset by handheld footage taken in the Ohio State Reformatory, where the scene was filmed.

Boyd v. Denton

Titled after the United States Federal Court decree that forced the closure of the infamously overcrowded Ohio State Reformatory, Everson’s film is a radical transformation of the prison and popular filming location, at once abstracting its interiors into monochrome patterns and textures, and reanimating the ghostly traces of its real and fictive former inhabitants.

If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move

If You Don't Watch the Way You Move features Derek "Dripp" Whitfield Jr. and Taymond "choSkii" Hughes of the music group BmE composing and recording their latest composition, "Shiesty", in the Columbus, Mississippi studio of Jermaine "Country Blakk" Brown only to be interrupted by a John Cage score.

Recovery

A 16mm film about an Airman training to be a pilot at Columbus Air Force Base, 14th Flying Training Wing, in Columbus, Mississippi.

Condor

The July 2, 2019 solar eclipse, filmed in 100% totality, over the Chilean coast, in 16mm black and white. Condor is the national bird of Chile.

Black Bus Stop

Students reclaim a popular gathering spot on the campus of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Brown and Clear

A collection of sfumato-tinged bottles shot with tight framing and shallow focus provides a mesmeric portrait of a man and a community in Northeast Ohio, where "Brown and Clear" commonly refer to "Bourbon and Vodka".

Tonsler Park

Tonsler Park observes, in black and white 16mm, the democratic process in action, at Charlottesville, Virginia voting precincts, over the course of Election Day, November 8, 2016.

Park Lanes

This immersive eight-hour documentary follows workers in a Virginia factory over the course of an entire day, from clock-in to clock-out. Long, unbroken sequences of assembly and fabrication focus on the bodies of African American and Vietnamese American workers, while both mobile and fixed cameras transform their acts into pure movement. Everson’s “shift-film” adjusts the frame on race, class, and labor, celebrating the everyday and imbuing working bodies with new dimensions.

Three Quarters

Two magicians in Philadelphia practice their slight of hand tricks.

Rita Larson's Boy

Rita Larson's Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. Rita Larson's Boy is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films are based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi. The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson (Rita Larson's boy) in the television series Sanford and Son. Tombigbee is the river the runs though Columbus.

Early Riser

This short is based on Chester Himes’s novel Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and its adaptation for the screen by Ossie Davis in 1970. The cotton in the novel and film comes from the region around Columbus, Mississippi. Shot in noir-style, the film focuses on the scene when detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones interrogate Lo-Boy, an artist/hustler, about the event around the demise of his friend Early Riser.

Chicken

Centred on a scene from Tennessee Williams’s play Kingdom of Earth (1968). Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus. Filmed as if it were a stage play, the title character, Chicken of Kingdom, struggles with how people view him.

Quality Control

Quality Control consists of a series of 16mm single take shots filmed in the summer of 2010,over a two day period, in a dry cleaners facility in Pritchard, Alabama, near Mobile, Quality Control exhibits the acts as well the conditions around labor and showcases, in Everson's words "the fine folks of Alabama producing a superior product." It is similar stylistically, in form and rhythm, to certain scenarios in Everson's award-winning and critically acclaimed previous films, including Erie (IFFR 2010) and in thematic concerns to several other short form works which follow the daily, quotidian tasks of workers in rest and in motion, and is an oblique sequel, ten years hence, to Everson's Creative Capital granted project A Week in the Hole (2001), which focused on an employee's adjustment to materials, time, space and personnel. - Written by Madeleine Molyneaux, producer

Erie

Erie consists of a series of single take vignettes in and around communities near Lake Erie that relate to Black migration in the USA, contemporary conditions, folks concentrating on the task at hand, theater and famous art objects.

Cinnamon

An experimental film that lifts the veil on the world of African American drag racing.

Spicebush

SPICEBUSH interweaves various fragmentary narratives concerning education, luck. landscapes, gaining and losing a job, and the passage of time. The technique and style employed alternates between the documentary, the symbolic, and more conventionally scripted scenes. Filming individuals engaged in their careers conveys the documentary aspect. At a symbolic level, the fossil is a leitmotif suggesting past and present. The title of the film refers to the state butterfly of Mississippi, Spicebush Swallowtail. In the film, Mississippi is a place of origin. The Spicebush Swallowtail represents renewal or starting over. Throughout the film, a little girl appears in different guises and settings, functioning indirectly in the role of the chorus. The scripted scenes, shot in a documentary style, collaged with the other scenes begin to create the traces of a narrative structure.