Film Details

The long-awaited feature debut of Cleveland-based experimental filmmaker and artist Robert C. Banks, Jr. is both a trippy, cinematic, b&w tear-sheet collage and a manifesto of urban Midwestern angst. Unlike most recent films about the North Coast rustbelt, this film is a love letter to the gritty underground cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. It features a variety of characters—from an angry elderly black man with a Don Quixote complex and his tarot card-reading artist grandson to a life-drawing model seeking an identity of his own and a hipster art student trying to break through bureaucratic barriers. All of them come together to combat a fictional philanthropic institution. The non-narrative story is expressed through original poetry and dance as well as new music composed and performed by local artists. The film was created with inner-city high school kids from the NewBridge Cleveland afterschool program and took three and a half years of shooting (often in 35mm ‘scope, with no real budget) and three more years of editing. The “late” George Gund Building of the Cleveland Institute of Art is one of many Cleveland locations featured in the film. Let’s sum it up this way: if Melvin Van Peebles, Charles Burnett, William Greaves, and Gordon Parks were to get high with Arthur Lipsett, Richard Myers, Bruce Conner, Luis Buñuel, John Cassavetes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Lester, and Derek Jarman while listening to Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart—and then make a movie together—the result might approximate Paper Shadows. (Film description by Robert Banks) World premiere. DCP. 79 min.