So Pretty
Available for Rental or Purchase on Vimeo
Now Streaming on The Criterion Channel
83min / Color / Super 16mm / USA/France / 2019
A 100 Year Films and Les Films du Bal Production
Distributed by Sentient.Art.Film
Development funding awarded by Centre national des arts plastiques and NYFA
Prod. Anne Coburn, Bill Kirstein, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, and Judith Lou Lévy
Featuring Edem Dela-Seshie, Thomas Love, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, and Rachika S
Directed, edited and written by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
Cinematography by Bill Kirstein
Based on the novel by Ronald M. Schernikau
Four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel so schön by Ronald M. Schernikau.
A transgender visual artist, Tonia, comes to New York City in 2018, where she meets her American boyfriend, the academic Franz, and works on an new exhibition of a work built around the legacy of German author Ronald M. Schernikau. Tonia and Franz talk politics, art, and love, go dancing, drink coffee, fuck, protest, and organize alongside their friends, the couple Paul and Erika, a transwoman and musician, and Helmut, a transmaculine political radical. When Paul becomes injured by the police following a political action, their social space is momentarily shattered. At the same time, the audience comes to realize that their lives and the film are morphing into a version of Schernikau’s novella so schön, a communist-themed depiction of four lovers in 1980s Berlin, read aloud by the characters throughout the film in voice-over and at the art installation. The film is overlaid with a mosaic of music from Rachika S, who also plays Erika, and a host of female electronic musicians.
An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right wing world, So Pretty moves freely between fictional depictions and semi-documentary, adaptation and translation, looking towards the artistic and personal worlds its characters generate across time and culture as a space for new tensions and potentials.
“It will all work out, little mouse. It will be something totally different than we can imagine." -- Ronald M.
Schernikau, so schön
Screenings at:
Berlin International Film Festival
IndieLisboa
BAM Cinemafest
Edinburgh International Film Festival
New Horizons International Film Festival Wrocław
FIDMarseille
FIC Valdivia
Göteburg Film Festival
Janela International de Cinema do Recife
NewFest
American Fringe at La Cinémathèque Française
Women Under the Influence
Denver International Film Festival
Milwaukee Film Festival
Festival Transcinema Peru
Cuórum Morelia
Bushwick Film Festival
Contrast Film Festival Austin
La Casa Encendida Madrid
queerfilm festival Bremen
Lustreifen Film Festival Basel
LesGaiCineMad
Toronto Queer Film Festival
Wanda Feminist Film Festival Belfast
Festival les Créatives Geneva
Cinema of Gender Transgression at Anthology Film Archives
Museum of Impossible Forms
Zinegoak Film Festival
Wolf Kino Berlin
Tacoma Film Festival
Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival
Streaming on Mubi March 2020
Streaming on Criterion Channel 2023
Currently streaming on Ovid
Awards:
Best International Feature, FIC Valdivia
Janela Critic's Prize, Best Feature, Janela International de Cinema do Recife
Best Feature, KRAK, Zinegoak Film Festival
#14, Film Comment Best Undistributed Films, 2019
"A bold, refreshing, sexy, and beautifully rendered film of warmth, intelligence, and desire. Original, breathtaking."
— Caden Mark Gardner, Mubi Notebook
“A clear highlight ... the kind of American independent film that deserves the spotlight treatment.”
— Vikram Murthi, RogerEbert.com
“Inventing the queer gaze in front of our eyes.”
— IndieWire
“Visually sumptuous [...] so eloquent about New York life, yet there’s not much else out there like it. A must-see.”
— Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, Artforum
"Rovinelli asks what trans films usually don’t: What if what had to transition was the world?"
— McKenzie Wark, e-flux
“[An] excellent meta-theatrical film about love in the 21st century.”
— Carla Moseguí, Cineuropa
“As a document of its moment in time, place and political conjuncture, So Pretty is already of inestimable value, but the film is also marked by assured, sensitive direction and a visual flair that at times matches the intensity of its literary inspiration.”
— Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema
"A balmy sea to momentarily float in, a dialectic Gatorade to replenish with before being thrust back out into the exhaustive brutalism of the current moment."
— Mark Lukenbill, Screen Slate
“[A] key document of a specific people in a specific place in an uncertain time.”
— Jordan Cronk, Film Comment
“[A] lovely meditative film. […] Rovinelli is an extraordinary young talent I am keeping my eye on.”
— Vaginal Davis
“Tender and dreamlike images … in which [Rovinelli] goes exploring and asks us with great warmth to follow her. […] So Pretty is an appeal to overcoming divisions and a call for us to build new communities and alliances.”
— Manuel Schubert, TAZ
Marriage Story
9.5min / Digital to 35mm / Color / USA / 2020
Presented by 100 Year Films
Produced by Anika Kash, Bill Kirstein, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
Directed, written, shot, edited and colored by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
Text by Anika Kash
Cinematographic assistance, at a distance, by Bill Kirstein.
Sound mix and design by Kenny Kusiak
Music by Ne/Re/A
An auto-fiction under the eyes of a female Christ, a marriage as a step into the forbidden land of the holy, a lesbian poem in the language of the divine, a paean to the color red, the world's slowest rave.
"Reintegrating what bourgeois religiosity keeps apart, i.e. the experiences of the spirit and the flesh."
— Srikanth Srinivasan, The Seventh Art
Screenings at:
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg
exground Film Festival
Brisbane Queer Film Festival
Roxy Cinema Tribeca
Austin Film Society
Empathy
83min / Color / HD & 16mm / USA / 2016
Director of Photography. Bill Kirstein
Sound. Kenny Kusiak
Addt'l Sound. Jeremie Brugidou
Music. Tim Rovinelli, Kenny Kusiak, Magic Fades, Vektroid, & Shisa.
Prod. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli & Bill Kirstein
Co-produced by Em Cominotti
Directed by Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
FIDMarseille 2016, International Competition, awarded the Prix du Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP)
Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival 2016, Czech Republic
Spoutnik Cinema, Geneva, Switzerland
Rencontres Paris/Berlin 2017 Videotheque
Art of the Real 2017, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York City
BAFICI 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Spectacle Theater, New York City
INDIE FESTIVAL São Paulo/Belo Horizonte
Ourense International Film Festival, Spain
Anthology Film Archives NYC Theatrical Relase
This documentary film follows a heroin-addicted professional escort as she moves between New York City, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Combining frank images of the actual labor of sex work with intimate portraits of her interpersonal life, the film is an alternately humorous and harrowing look at a seldom depicted side of American life as well as a meditation on the performativity at the core of documentary filmmaking and the sex industry alike. Shot on a mixture of 16mm and HD digital video in luxuriant long takes, its disciplined style foregrounds the sensual texture of the everyday while playing with the conventions of narrative cinema, focussing on the profound interrelation of performance and identity within the socioeconomic fabric of the U.S. Written in close collaboration with its subject/star, Empathy marks the feature-length directorial debut for Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli.
"Distinguished by emotional tenderness and compositional elegance ... [a] gentle sketch of an American margin."
— Danny King, The Village Voice
"Rovinelli and Cominotti ... seem to be pursuing bigger, more abstract questions concerning what it means to be a person in the first place. For a film that feels so small and personal, its ambition is immense."
— Dan Sullivan, Film Comment
""Sex worker," "white trash," "queer," "junkie" -- these are the prison of words that are dispersed across the melodramatic continuum in this documentary fiction ... Profoundly moving."
— Isabelle Regnier, Le Monde
“Can performance and reality be separated? Does it matter? [...] Full of tenderness and, yes, empathy for its subject [...] the suggestion of happiness despite all, even for the briefest of moments, feels sublime.”
— Kazu Watanabe, Screen Slate
"An intimate and affecting portrait ... [with] an incredibly strong performance by the lead, at once natural and distanced. [...] A picture of contemporary American life emerges, of dependence on money for rent and health insurance as much as on drugs and other people."
— Henrike Meyer, Das Filter
Fuck Work
12 min. Color. 2015.
Prod. Sara'o Bery
Starring. Julianna Schley
Camera. Bill Kirstein
Sound Design & Mix. Kenny Kusiak
Music. Tim Rovinelli
Dir., Script, Edit. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
Cinema Libre Hamburg 2015
Fetisch Film Festival Kiel 2016, Christopher Michael Haag awarded Best Actor in a Short Film
Fetish Film Festival Copenhagen 2016
Stigma Unbound, Anthology Film Archives 2018
3PM (Puma Automatic)
3.5 min. Color.
Music Video / House Party
Dir., Edit, DP. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli
Prod. Sara'o Bery.
Included in a group show at The Living Gallery in New York City.