Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
ZOË LUND
July 12 – July 18
Actor, agitator, musician, and writer, Zoë Lund (née Tamerlis) was always politically inclined. Born in New York City in 1962, she dropped out of college in 1979. A year later, she’d make her acting debut in Abel Ferrara’s MS .45.
“Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,” reads the headline of a 1983 news clipping. Below, a picture of Lund “working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman.” Uninterested in mute beauty, she wanted to write and produce her own projects.
In the 1980s, Lund appeared in several feature films and television shows, including Larry Cohen’s SPECIAL EFFECTS and MIAMI VICE. At this time, she was also the partner and collaborator of the filmmaker and activist Edouard de Laurot – best known for BLACK LIBERATION (1967), featuring Malcolm X.
In 1992, Lund wrote the screenplay of Ferrara’s BAD LIEUTENANT, in which she also starred, addressing her own addiction to heroin. She died in Paris in 1999, at the age of 37, of heart failure due to cocaine use, leaving behind several unpublished novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays.
Last year, Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie (as Small Press/Editions Lutanie) released a book of Lund’s early poetry titled simply ‘Poems’. They also spent a few months looking for the lost 16mm HOT TICKET, a two-minute film which Lund directed for the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1993. Thanks to LaCava and Lutanie’s efforts, the original copy was eventually found at and restored by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. It will premiere in the context of this program alongside a selection of films related to Lund, in the hope of highlighting the radical nature of her work and thought.
Guest-programmed and presented by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, in collaboration with Robert Lund. Special thanks to Robert Lund; Mijke de Jong; and Rachèl van Olm; as well as to Nicole Brenez; Antoine Thirion; Michelle Carey; and Leenke Ripmeester (Eye Filmmuseum).
For more info about the publication ‘Poems’, visit: https://shop.smallpressnyc.com/products/poems
