Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a guest piece! But we’re switching up the usual format today, reader. Because today’s newsletter comes from my filmmaker friend Kelsey Ianuzzi, who launched her own Substack earlier this year. So instead of just pasting her words into my newsletter, I’ll give it some context and then link to her own published piece at the bottom.1
Kelsey also launched something much grander than a Substack earlier this year: her first feature-length film. For more than a decade, she’s been doing Emmy-winning work for Alabama Public Television and other outlets, but she stepped up in a big way with Show Me the Line, a documentary about a group of women in Alabama seeking fertility medicine at a time when our state decided to make that sort of thing very difficult for irrational and even contradictory reasons.2 It’s a beautiful and necessary portrait of not just a group of people but a place and a time, and I hope you all get to see it.
To that point, Show Me the Line premiered in June at the Bentonville Film Festival, one of the best women-centric film fests in the world that was founded by screen legend Geena Davis. And in October, it’ll be screening at the New Orleans Film Festival, one of the best film fests in the Southeast, full stop. But before it does that, Show Me the Line will have not one but two homecoming screenings at the Sidewalk Film Festival next week. It’ll screen first at 5:00 on Saturday, August 29th at the beautiful Lyric Theatre, and then it’ll have an encore screening at 7:00 that same night at the lovely Alabama School of Fine Arts.3
Since I love to feature Alabama filmmakers who are set to make a big splash at Sidewalk, I asked Kelsey to write a post connecting her documentary to an older film. She took the assignment and told me she’d be writing about Peter Weir’s breakthrough drama Picnic at Hanging Rock. It was a choice I didn’t expect, but it’s a very fitting one. Both films are about women living under oppressed conditions and seeking an escape, and while they’re not very similar on the surface—Kelsey made sure to clarify that her documentary is “far more humorous and hopeful” than Weir’s film—the influence makes perfect sense.
So go give Kelsey’s post a read, then give her a follow and let her know how welcoming the FilmStack community is. (She keeps telling me she needs to post more, so polite peer pressure will go a long way.) And if you’ll be at the Sidewalk Film Festival next weekend, don’t miss the film that’s guaranteed to be the talk of the town.
I probably should’ve been doing this the whole time when my guest writers also have their own Substacks. But maybe there’s no wrong way to do a crossover collaboration, right?
Single tickets are already sold out for the Lyric Theatre screening and close to selling out for the ASFA screening, but you can still get in (earlier, in fact) if you have a VIP badge or a day pass! I’ll be at the Lyric that night, just so you know.
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