FILMS/
PROTAGONIST
Documentaries
USA, 2006, 90 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Sat, Apr 28 / 06:15 / SFMOMA / PROT28S
Mon, Apr 30 / 04:15 / Kabuki / PROT30K
Tue, May 1 / 09:15 / Kabuki / PROT01K
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jessica Yu
- prod
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Susan West, Elise Pearlstein
- scr
-
Jessica Yu
- cam
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Russell Harper, Karl Hahn
- editor
-
Jessica Yu
- mus
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Jeff Beal
- cast
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Hans-Joachim Klein, Mark Pierpont, Joe Loya, Mark Salzman
- source
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Diorama Films, LLC., 616 North Avenue #65, Los Angeles, CA 90042 EMAIL: slwest@aol.com
Is character fate? What could a German terrorist, an "ex-gay" minister, a bank robber and a martial arts enthusiast possibly have in common? How much can the fifth-century Greek playwright Euripides tell us about the modern self and its fundamental limitations? These are but a few of the questions Jessica Yu ponders in Protagonist. Yu is no stranger to unconventional subjects; she won an Academy Award in 1997 for her documentary short Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, about a writer who was confined to an iron lung for four decades, and her previous feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, examined the life and work of outsider artist Henry Darger. Framed as a quartet of first-person, talking-head narratives of disparate men on singular quests, Yu examines each subject’s story through the prism of Euripidean tragedy. The film in fact began as a challenge from the Carr Foundation to make a documentary about Euripides, but Yu soon shifted her focus to the four extremists (whittled down from 200 finalists) who, like so many characters in Euripides, wind up far from their intended destination. Incorporating Greek dialogue culled from Euripides' Bacchae and experimental filmmaker Janie Geiser’s wooden-rod puppetry, Yu puts a historical spin on the plight of her contemporary subjects. Her artful blending of past and present and the remarkable stories of her unusual quartet make for a wonderfully unconventional documentary/essay film on the timelessness of the human struggle.
—Andy Bailey
West Coast Premiere. Sponsored by KQED Public Broadcasting.