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PAUL FESTA
Paul Festa's films include the widely acclaimed experimental documentaries Apparition of the Eternal Church and Tie It Into My Hand, and the silent-film comedy The Glitter Emergency. His multimedia documentary performance installation Night of a Thousand Agneses was nominated for the Berlin Arts Prize. Residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell, ODC Theater, and Centre des Récollets. He teaches a wide range of subjects in the practicing arts and humanities at the Barenboim-Said Academy and Bard College Berlin. His film-in-progress, Materano, is the subject of his eponymous novel-in-progress, winner of Lambda Literary's 2024 Samuel Prize.
APPARITION OF THE ETERNAL CHURCH (51 min, 2006)
Hailed by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross as “mind-bending...mesmerizing...intensely personal,” Apparition of the Eternal Church translates the music of Olivier Messiaen through the spontaneous responses of people listening over headphones to an organ work of fire-and-brimstone intensity. Capturing a vigorous confrontation between nonbelievers and sacred music, the film won numerous prizes and screened throughout the US and Europe, including at the Library of Congress, San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, and London's Southbank and Barbican Centres. With Eisa Davis, Wayne Koestenbaum, Justin Bond, John Cameron Mitchell, and the late Harold Bloom.
THE GLITTER EMERGENCY (20 min, 2010)
Winner of numerous awards, The Glitter Emergency tells the story of a peg-leg ballerina's stage triumph. An homage to 1920s silent-film screwball comedy, the film performs an unprecedented experiment with the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, treating the solo part as a dramatic character while merging film, concerto, opera, dance, and music video in what KQED San Francisco calls “a rapturous fusion of camp and class.” Starring Paul Festa with members of the San Francisco Ballet and the Cockettes.
TIE IT INTO MY HAND (78 min, 2015)
Tie It Into My Hand is a kaleidoscopic documentary about being an artist. Its experimental premise is that more than five dozen artists, none violinists, are interviewed in the form of a violin lesson they teach director Paul Festa, a Juilliard-trained violinist whose career was curtailed by a hand injury. The encounters sound variations on a theme relevant to any life of purpose: resilience is everything. With Colman Domingo, Margaret Cho, Mink Stole, Alan Cumming, Peter Coyote, Barbara Hammer, Harold Bloom, Robert Pinsky.
NIGHT OF A THOUSAND AGNESES (30 min loop, 2015; various remixes)
Five-minute documentary about the work
Night of a Thousand Agneses is a video performance that embodies the dancer and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence founder Agnes de Garron using video footage of her interview for Tie It Into My Hand. A Berlin Arts Prize nominee, this interactive installation confronts viewers with an up-close and personal experience of Agnes, who is variously wise, funny, astrological, and elegiac in her musings on a life spent in art and activism.
MATERANO (in progress)
Nine-minute introduction
In 1920, at the age of 20, the filmmaker’s grandfather Francesco Festa emigrated to the United States, fleeing extreme poverty in the southern Italian city of Matera, where 20,000 people lived in caves without plumbing or electricity. Known as la vergogna nazionale, the shame of the nation, the ancient city of Matera was forcibly evacuated as postwar Europe rebuilt, but the relocation of its inhabitants took twenty years and the Festas Francesco left behind were still in the cave into the 1970s. The documentary shows how Francesco’s hardships in the New World gave his descendants a life his contemporaries could scarcely have imagined, even as Rome’s intervention and investment created the conditions for the Italian family’s contemporary prosperity in a renewed city of stone.
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