Infamy - film

Klimseven

http://www.infamythemovie.com

Infamy is an intense journey into the lives, minds, and families of seven individuals who are obsessed with graffiti and follow that obsession into the most unexpected places. Cameras follow Los Angeles legend SABER by night as he dangles on the supports of a billboard hovering twenty stories up, and by day into the city’s Museum of Natural History, where he is featured in an exhibition about the L.A. River. New Yorkers EARSNOT and CLAW cover the City’s surfaces with their tags in the face of their graffiti minority status as openly gay and female, respectively, and then into their jobs as icons in the Downtown fashion scene. Philadelphia’s ENEM and Los Angeles’ TOOMER tour their intricate murals for murdered friends, as well as their rapidly styled tag signatures, which they frankly prefer. San Francisco’s JASE heads to paint freight trains that will take his art throughout North America, then to his day job in graffiti-specialized spray paint distribution. Finally, there’s JOE CONNOLLY “The Graffiti Guerrilla,” who makes the removal of Los Angeles graffiti his daily passion. Woven throughout these individuals’ stories are their families and neighborhoods; and for every preconception of who is a graffiti writer that they fulfill, there’s one that turns out dead wrong.

Infamy director Doug Pray is best known for directing the critically acclaimed feature documentaries Scratch, about hip-hop DJs (Palm Pictures), Hype! about the explosion and exploitation of the Seattle music scene (Lions Gate Entertainment), and for editing the Hughes brothers’ film American Pimp, all of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. For Infamy, Pray has teamed up with writer, researcher, and creative advisor Roger Gastman, the founder and former editor of While You Were Sleeping magazine, co-founder and editor of the new quarterly magazine Swindle, and author of several books, including Enamelized, Dalek: Nickel Plated Angels, and Free Agents: A History of Washington DC Graffiti. Gastman’s first-hand knowledge of the graffiti world allowed access and trust among the graffiti writers portrayed in the film.

“I didn’t want to make another ‘scene-movie’ or a general overview of subculture and its history. Instead, we’ve set out to create a more hard-hitting, personal portrayal of the pain and joy of being addicted to the only illegal art form there is.” Pray said, adding, “These are intensely passionate individuals, they are incredibly talented at destroying surfaces with spray paint, and they don’t like cameras… What more could you ask for in a subject?”

Trailor on site. By the same guy who did 'Scratch'. It was on in the IFI last Saturday as part of the RESFEST film tour (http://www.resfest.com/index.php?page=films&zone=Infamy). Really good documentary, especially if you don't know much about graffiti or the motivations of the people behind it. Available on DVD from February.


the (illegal) LA River piece by saber, one of the featured graffiti writers.

Klimseven

http://www.piecebypiecemovie.com
also a good new documentary on San Francisco graf. Coming out on DVD soon
Trailor: http://www.piecebypiecemovie.com/trailer_large.mov

drdre

this sounds good, also waiting on 50 cents new movie.

Executive Steve

yeah was GUTTED i missed this, i loved scratch...