Quest

Date: Monday, November 6, 2017

Time: 7pm

Location: Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA

Filmmakers: Jonathan Olshefski (Director) and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon (Producer)

Film Details: 106 minutes, 2008-2017, USA, color, DCP

Film Website | Trailer (New!) |  Watch an excerpt from the film | Facebook event | Tickets

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Full Frame Film Festival. Official Selection of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

Producer Sabrina S. Gordon will attend in person for discussion with Lisa Simmons, Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and President and Founder of the Color of Film Collaborative

About the Film:

Filmed with vérité intimacy for over a decade, QUEST is the moving portrait of a family in North Philadelphia. Christopher “Quest” Rainey, along with his wife Christine’a, aka “Ma Quest,” open the door to their home music studio, which serves as a creative sanctuary from the strife that grips their neighborhood. Over the years, the family evolves as everyday life brings a mix of joy and unexpected crisis. Set against the backdrop of a country now in turmoil, QUEST is a tender depiction of an American family whose journey is a profound testament to love, healing and hope.

“Olshefski resists hopeful banality as well as easy nihilism, forging a complex tonality in which these conditions merge with countless other emotional registers—as in anyone’s actual life. In this film, humiliation walks hand-in-hand with transcendence.” – Slant

About the Filmmakers:

Jonathan Olshefski (Director) is an artist and documentary filmmaker. QUEST is his first feature length documentary. He strives to tell intimate and nuanced stories that honor his subjects’ complexity by employing a production process that emphasizes collaboration, dialogue, and relationship to amplify their voices and reflect their points of view in an artful way.

He has an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and is currently an Assistant Professor at Rowan University where he teaches in the department of Radio, TV, and Film. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two sons.

Sabrina Schmidt Gordon (Producer) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her editing debut won an Emmy for WGBH’s “Greater Boston Arts” series and she has continued to distinguish herself as a producer, editor, and now, director. She is the Co-Director/Producer and Editor of BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, winner of Best Film Directed by a Woman of Color at the 2015 African Diaspora International Film Festival. Sabrina is also the Co-Producer and Editor of DOCUMENTED, the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning undocumented journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas. The film had record viewership for its CNN broadcast, received Oscar buzz, and was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Best Documentary Film. Other credits include Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was named in the Chicago Tribune’s “Best Documentaries of 2007, The New Black, and The New Mad Men, which won the 2015 Imagen Award for Best National Informational Program. Sabrina is on the board of the Yale Visual Law Project with Fred Wiseman and Alex Gibney, and teaches documentary filmmaking at the Columbia University School of Journalism and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Screens with:

IN THIS WORLD

15 minutes | 2016 | Directed by Kelly Creedon

Courvosier Cox, better known as Vosiey, is a triple threat: an actor, singer and comedian, destined to perform sold-out shows in LA. But first he must make it through the challenge of being 15, an exciting and tumultuous time that brings a new sense of independence along with a search for self and longing for acceptance. As he navigates this tenuous line between childhood and adulthood and between dreams and reality, he will keep searching for the spotlight, no matter what.