New England Legacy: Lucia Small

After the success of My Father, The Genius, Lucia Small met Ed Pincus, pioneering documentarian and a founder of the MIT Film/Video Section, when their paths crossed at a film festival. Finding each other to have similar sensilibites, they began collaborating as co-directors on projects that pushed ideas of interrogating responsibility and the identities of their makers. One Cut, One Life is their final film together, bookended by the recent violent deaths of two of Small’s closest friends, including her roommate, the gifted editor Karen Schmeer, as well as Pincus’ own terminal illness.

As much a treatise on our determination to prolong life through risky medical procedures as it is a record of two careers, Small and Pincus continue to push the limits of propriety. After indelibly changing the course of observational and personal documentary, Pincus and his family retreated to a Vermont flower farm. Much of this film takes place there, far from the centers of American documentary but featuring conversations that hark back to the conflict between Pincus and his wife, Jane, as recorded in Pincus’ landmark Diaries (1971-1976). Unlike other studies with consent and participation, however, every character in One Cut, One Life chooses not to withdraw but to engage. They collectively ask each other, and in turn, us as the audience, questions of authorship, sacrifice, and need. (AS)

“An elegy for the dead, the dying, and those who live on, ‘One Cut, One Life’ is a singular work made from a double vision… In short, as messy and precious as life itself.”  Ty Burr, Boston Globe

“One Cut, One Life is as intuitive as its structure, as natural as the processes of dying and mourning that make up its core.” Diana Clarke, Village Voice

New England Legacy Film! World Premiere at Full Frame. Official selection of IFFBoston, NYFF, Torino.

A road trip in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina entwines a critique of the documentarian and humanitarian urges with stories of strength in true community.

A quick prologue establishes the basics of this road trip: moved by images of destruction on TV, filmmaker Lucia Small convinces Ed Pincus to make his first film in decades. Together, they spend two months filming the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. They start by recording encounters with evacuees on their drive to the disaster zone. In Pittsburgh, one former New Orleanian explains the film’s title: after Hurricane Bessie in 1965, many residents started keeping an axe in the attic of their homes to break through their roofs and avoid drowning, recognizing that help often came too late.

When Small and Pincus arrive in New Orleans, they find a system that has failed and residents who are variously resigned, overwhelmed, and stoic in their determination to rebuild. The stories they tell are full of complaints about labyrinthian red tape and police brutality, two threads that have dominated current media coverage of COVID-19 and recent protests. Are the nonprofits and people—like Small and Pincus themselves—who have hurried to New Orleans doing more harm than good? The Axe in the Attic doesn’t allow us to look away: the exact complexity of these relationships are tangled, and often remain disturbingly so. Unlike conventional issue-based documentaries, or even those who ostensibly reveal the subjectivity of the filmmaker, these two directors share their disagreements and qualms with each other, train the lens on themselves, and maintain separate voiceovers. This brave, enduring film interrogates the limits of the first-person perspective that has since abounded in reality tv, body cameras, cell phone cameras, and even fiction films that traffic in the authenticity of the handheld point of view. (AS)

New England Legacy Film! World Premiere at NYFF. Official selection of Human Rights Watch, Cinéma du Réel, Full Frame, and Provincetown.

An anti-hagiographic and bravely personal look at a visionary architect fading into obscurity, helmed by his filmmaker daughter.

While forging a career as a documentary producer, Lucia Small was told by her father that he wanted her to write his biography upon his death. Glen Howard Small was a visionary architect deeply embedded in the West Coast scene before his rising stardom plummeted. Deciding to make work on her father on her own terms, Small picked up the camera and focused on Glen, his former colleagues and students, his ex-wives, her siblings, and herself in this exploration of the meaning of fame and the value of maintaining personal relationships.

A long-time Bostonian but trained outside the Cambridge schools that pioneered the personal documentary, Small’s directorial debut forges a path of her own, majestically merging the biographical, architecture theory, and the personal. Archival footage of Glen in his younger days and animation of his theoretical creations allow us to get a picture of his work without his self-propagandizing. But the heart of this film is comprised of cantankerous and illuminating interviews between Small, Glen, and all those who currently or once orbited Glen. Viewed today, My Father, The Genius still stands out for its revelations about how we choose to shape our legacies. Edited with skill and compassion by the late Karen Schmeer, who picked up a jury prize at Slamdance for her collaboration with Small. (AS)

“To Lucia Small’s credit, the film is neither a fluff piece for the architect or a bitter account of a wayward father. Instead, she has used animation, archival footage, and extensive interviews with family, friends, clients and former students to craft a humorously disconcerting film that could be about anyone’s father…”  Dianne Bates, Los Angeles Times

New England Legacy Film! World Premiere and prize winner at Slamdance. Official selection of IDFA, Maryland, Provincetown, NWFF, VIFF, Mill Valley.