EAT

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Photos by Tiffany Roohani

by Tatiana Rivera

On the set of Eat at the Barclay Hotel

One to watch on LA’s rising indie film scene is native New Yorker, Janicza Bravo. The film and stage director, whose breakout short film Eat premiered at South By Southwest earlier this year, has attracted scores of positive attention to her budding body of work.

Both written and directed by Bravo, her debut film reveals a variety of her many talents, but it’s her uncanny ability to take the scene from quirky to dark in a matter of seconds that most sets her apart as a director.

Eat is a harrowing narrative starring Brett Gelman (The Other Guys, Curb Your Enthusiasm) as an anxious recluse and his next-door neighbor, played by Katherine Waterston (Taking Woodstock). An awkward encounter between the two becomes steadily more unsettling. The film is characterized by the short dialogue, engaging performances by the characters and a soundtrack by Heather Christian playing drearily throughout the film. Ultimately, Eat is just as much about loneliness as it is a foreboding message about instinct versus empathy.

Through Eat, Bravo made her debut as a film director, but her true niche lies in stage directing. An aptness she wanted to carry with her from the theater capital of the world to a city where theater going is almost unheard of.

“In LA, you have to beg people to see theater. It’s very much a film city. And it takes a lot of convincing. In New York it’s not like that. That’s what excites me about it.” “In New York theatre is over saturated,” said Bravo. “One of the reasons I moved to LA is I wanted to make work in a place that didn’t feel like it needed it.”

Much to the frustration of countless theater producers, the majority of Angelinos are still just too reluctant to spend money on theater—especially independent, low budget productions. Bravo is determined to help shape a new value to a dying art.

“People don’t necessarily know that they want theater here because it’s not a big part of LA culture,” Bravo points out. “You ask someone how many plays they’ve seen and they’re like, ‘um.’ There’s a different relationship to arts and culture.

“Culture in LA is knowing the film industry. Culture in New York is knowing theater.”

It is with that desire to attract a new audience to the ancient genre that convinced Bravo she needed to bring her hunger for indie stage theater to Los Angeles, a challenge three years in the making.

“I wanted to throw myself into something that was totally foreign and that would be a little harder and challenging. Not that making theater in New York is not challenging, but it felt a little familiar.”

Before focusing more aptly on film, Bravo was already excelling at costume design and styling. With a resume that boasts Funny Or Die, Good Charlotte and Fat Boy Slim, Bravo spent a good chunk of her twenties costuming people in music videos and commercial films such as Notorious. One of her most memorable projects was designing clothes for the puppet in Kanye West’s video for his single “Champion”.

Bravo has come a long way from Panama, where she was born and spent the first half of her life as a track runner. Ambitious since her childhood days, a brave little Bravo trained in track and field since the age of four. Tragically, she was pulled away from that dream at the age of 14.

“I believed I was going to win a gold medal in the 2000 Olympics. Then I had spinal surgery when I was a teenager and that really changed my path.”

As one opportunity ended, another one began for her at New York University, where she set her sights on being a theater actor, that is, until one teacher implored her to continue a pursuit towards directing.

“He said to me, ‘You are a director.’ … And I was taken aback,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to do that. And how dare he tell me what I am.”

Now that Bravo is working on her latest feature called Lemmon with her boyfriend Brett Gelman who took her to the Canne’s festival this year, she has discovered a passion for unrestrained world of short film.

Having been invited to the largest and most prestigious festival of its kind, Bravo came back from the South of France with a better understanding of the inner workings of film in different cultures and languages.

“If you want to make a different kind of film here, you really have to work hard at it. People are going for what makes money, not what’s going to be the most artful.”

It is dedicated and brilliant people like Bravo that can change that.

 

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