Overview
A young man dies of a heroin overdose in an abandoned house in Baltimore. On the eve of his funeral, family and friends gather to commemorate his life. Their shared memories paint a portrait of a community hanging in the balance, skewed by poverty, city living, and a generational divide, united in their pursuit of a new American Dream.
My second feature film, PUTTY HILL, was born not from a script but from a 5-page scenario, a formal construct combining traditions of documentary and narrative realism allowing for a heightened degree of improvisation from the cast and crew.
According to the Maryland Film Festival program notes, "the film's central thread comes from a group of friends and family preparing for the wake of Cory, a Baltimore man whose life was taken by a heroin overdose. As characters reconnect and mourn, many are interviewed by an off-screen voice about who they are and how they live, bringing the narrative into points of intersection with documentary and experimental film. Skate parks, living-room tattoo parlors, paint-gun melees, and karaoke bars provide the visually stunning backdrop for a chorus of scarred but dignified voices calling out for better lives. As with HAMILTON, neighborhood is another integral thread, weaving us through uniquely Baltimorean rural spaces on the edges of our urban experience."
Shot for $18K, PUTTY HILL premiered at the 2010 International Forum of New Cinema in Berlin and has toured festivals all over the world. It won "Best Picture" at the Santiago International Film Festival in Chile, the Festival International du Film de La Roche-sur-Yon, the Festivala Autorskog Filma in Belgrade, and the Atlanta Film Festival. It was recently nominated for a Cinema Eye Honors Award for Nonfiction Filmmaking by The Museum of the Moving Image and Filmmaker Magazine.
In February of 2011 Cinema Guild released PUTTY HILL theatrically in United States, followed by a DVD release in the fall. In other territories, the film has found distribution in France, Germany, Austria, and the UK.
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