The Ongoing Inspirational True Story of 'The Sweet East'
In Which I Frantically, Somewhat Desperately Plug the Popular Arthouse Hit 'The Sweet East,' and Everything Pertaining to It
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I come before you bearing news of the Major Motion Picture that I wrote the screenplay for, The Sweet East, the Cannes debut of which I announced here back in April of 2023. Since premiering in the Quinzaine des cinéastes section of that festival the picture, directed by Sean Price Williams, has been making the international fest rounds. I’ve been dutifully following it to festivals in Australia, Serbia, Belgium, Spain, Poland, Slovenia, Germany, and the United States, where it opened, via Utopia, in a limited release in December, with brief engagements in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Toronto, Canada, and an ongoing stand at IFC Center in New York City. I’d imagine that most everyone has had the opportunity to see the trailer by now, but on the odd chance you haven’t, well, here it is:
The Sweet East begins its wider North American rollout in January/February, in the course of which Mr. Williams and myself, both together and individually, will appear in various cities in the U.S. and Canada to tirelessly promote our beautiful work of art; listed below are forthcoming screenings with “talent” attached, which I will update when and if further dates are added. (Past dates will be italicized but remain for, y’know, posterity.) For a more extensive list of our ever-expanding bookings, with and without us present, as well as ticket-buying options, I recommend that the dedicated cinephile refer to the thesweeteast.com. You can also, of course, wait a couple of months and rent the movie on the Internet, but if at all possible I’d really recommend that you see it in a cinema. If we are spending a lot of time on the road, and not as much time as we should on updating our Substacks, it’s because we’d like as many people as possible to be able to watch the movie in a communal setting, as God intended movies to be watched, and as we are a low-budget operation working with a small distributor, we have to fight tooth-and-nail for every booking we get and generally go a lot harder in the paint than the big guys.
Anyhow, here’s where the parade is heading in the near future, and who will be at the screenings:
January 4th- 6th - Alamo Drafthouse Bryant Street, Washington, D.C. (NP on the 4th, SPW + NP on the 5th and 6th)
January 10th - Cinema Arts Center, Huntington, NY (SPW, NP, Talia and Mimi Ryder, Jack Irv)
January 12th - 13th - Cinema du Parc, Montréal, QC (NP)
January 17th - Upstate Films, Rhinebeck, NY (SPW + NP)
Jan 23rd – The Plaza, Atlanta, GA (SPW + NP)
January 26th - 27th - Landmark NuArt, Los Angeles, CA (SPW + Simon Rex, with guest moderator Simon Baker)
February 2nd - Los Feliz 3, Los Angeles, CA (SPW + Simon Rex)
February 6th - Belcourt, Nashville, TN (NP)
February 7th - Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (NP)
February 9th – The Beacon, Seattle, WA (NP)
February 12th - The Woodward, Cincinnati, OH (NP)
February 13th - Gateway Film Center, Columbus, OH (NP)
February 15th - The Neon, Dayton, OH (NP)
February 16th - The Cleveland Cinematheque, Cleveland, OH (NP)
February 17th - Nightlight Cinema, Akron, OH (NP)
February 18th – The Cleveland Cinematheque, Cleveland, OH (NP)
We had a great afterparty in D.C. I made a flyer:
All of the Q & As have been a grand ol’ time thus far, and I would be remiss not to thank our many fine moderators: Adam Friedland, Chloë Sevigny, Michael M. Bilandic, and Dasha Nekrasova (in New York); Dapper Dan Midas and Eric Allen Hatch (in Baltimore); Kazik Radwanski (in Toronto); Trey Sheilds (in Philadelphia); Bruno Dequen (in Montréal); Poppy de Villeneuve (in Rhinebeck); Sean Baker and Eugene Kotlyarenko (in Los Angeles); Nathan Viner (in Louisville); Tommy Swenson and Charles Mudede (in Seattle); Peter Van Hyning (in Cincinnati); Jonathan McNeal (in Dayton); and Zachariah Durr (in Cleveland).
For international readers, the movie presently has theatrical distribution in place—to the best of my knowledge, at least—in France (by Potemkine); in Spain (by Caramel Films); in Italy (by I Wonder); in Japan (by New Select); in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (by Cherry Pickers); in Australia and New Zealand (by Static Vision); in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (by NonStop Entertainment); in the Baltic States, Russia, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (by A-One Films); in Portugal (by Leopardo Filmes); and in the Ukraine (by Traffic Films)… so if you live in any of those places, presumably you’ll be able to see The Sweet East sometime in 2024. (As international release dates come in, I’ll list them below.) Additionally, HBO Europe has the SVOD and pay television rights to the movie in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. So there’s that. There’s no U.S. streaming deal in place at present, but when the inevitable occurs, you will be the first to know.
In anticipation of our wider release we rolled out our official poster—as opposed to the placeholder we’d been using since Cannes—a couple of weeks ago; it reproduces a lovely original oil-on-board painting by our friend Kat Mukai, inspired by Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 Washington Crossing the Delware, and I’m exceedingly fond of it. There are a few copies of the poster signed by Sean and myself available at Posteritati, which you can get here, though if you’d prefer to have a copy without our chicken scratch on it, I’m sure those will be available soon enough.
Speaking of merch, there’s also a The Sweet East t-shirt designed by the redoubtable Nathan Gelgud, seen below, which you can snap up here. It’s my hope to get a post-screening “merch table” set-up going in the near future to hawk Bombasts and various other sundry items, though for them what wants to get issue #2 in the mail, you can do so here.
Sean, various cast members, and myself have been doing sporadic press since May, as one does in these situations, so if you’d care to listen to or read us blabbering about the movie, there are ample opportunities to do so, some of which I’ve compiled below:
NP with Lauren Collee, for Melbourne International Film Festival website.
SPW, Talia Ryder, and Simon Rex with Allanah Elster, for the Columbia Spectator.
SPW, NP, Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, and Earl Cave with Conor Truax, for In Review Online.
SPW, NP, Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, and Earl Cave with Jack Schenker, for Hammer to Nail.
I should also note that superfan Nicky Otis Smith made the movie—and an interview with Sean and myself—the subject of the second issue of his ‘zine, The Servant, which you should still be able to snag a copy of at Baltimore’s Beyond Video. (The picture below is from the lobby of the Charm City’s Senator theater, where Sean famously saw Saving Private Ryan in 1998.)
There are various Q & A videos out there as well; it may be that I’ll compile them here at some point. Once the movie has made its rounds, I’ll also offer up some observations about its conception, its shooting, and its life in the world on the Substackeroo, but only at such time as everyone who wants to see it has had a chance to do so.
The reception to the film, from “the public” and from “the industry” both, has thus far been extremely gratifying. This is not to say that the reviews have been uniformly positive or that we’ve raked in Gotham nominations, but that the individuals and institutions who neither like nor respect the film, by an extraordinary coincidence, happen to be individuals and institutions that I neither like nor respect, and it gives me an almost erotic frisson to know that I have stolen 104 minutes out of their one and only lives. Of the good notices on the film—by which I mean “well-written,” not “positive,” though, by an even more dazzling coincidence, these two categories overlap completely—I have been most gratified by those of Fernando Ganzo in Cahiers du cinéma, Olivier Lamm in Libération, Zach Lewis in In Review Online, Brianna Zigler in Paste Magazine, Àngel Quintana in Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, Rory O’Connor in Film Stage, Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield in The Pamphleteer, Sean Burns for WBUR, Christian Lorentzen and Matthew Gasda in their respective Substacks, and Catherine Bray in Variety, whose observation, in her Cannes write-up, that the film was “viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience,” gets at something that those who go scratching around the film in search of an allegory miss entirely. Similarly satisfying were the comments of the estimable Bob Kohler on the website Con los ojos abiertos, who discusses the film as—first and foremost—a ripping yarn, not a position paper. (Writes Kohler: “The story pulls on the leash the artist clings to, but the artist knows when to let go, trusting that the story will find the way to return home.”)
All said, getting the movie in front of people and touring it like Black Flag and getting to hear what folks think of it has been a gas, a source of pleasure in a calendar year otherwise chock-a-block with reasons to want to hang one’s self in a tool shed. (The subject of my last post here.) A particular highlight occurred last October when, as the previous eight Octobers, I headed to Ghent, Belgium to teach a Young Critics’ Workshop organized by my friend Bart Versteirt and attached to the city’s film festival—the difference this year being that a movie that I’d worked on was in the lineup, and I was joined in the last days of the workshop by Sean, Talia, and actor Earl Cave to intro our screenings, do Q & As, you know, “World tour, media whore, please the press in Belgium…”
Anyhow, another fine Flemish friend, Ruben Demasure, had asked Sean and myself if we’d be interested in doing a special Ghent edition of City Dudes, the “blindfolded” screening series—meaning nobody knows what’s playing before they get to the cinema—that we’ve done semi-regularly at the Roxy Cinema for almost two years now. As it happened, the first title we talked about screening when we started City Dudes was a Belgian film, 1974’s Vase de Noces, but the Cinematek in Brussels wasn’t loaning out prints of the film after their recent DCP restoration of it, and anyways we don’t have the budget to import even a DCP… But in the Kingdom of Belgium?
The movie, directed by Thierry Zéno, is about a young, mentally disturbed man living alone on a ramshackle farm in the dampest, muddiest, bleakest stretch of the Belgian countryside. The man, who speaks only in pre-verbal grunts, passes his days affixing doll’s heads onto confused pigeons, collecting plant life, and sexually interfering with the sow that is his bosom companion, and who subsequently gives birth to a litter of three piglets, the man’s apparent offspring. I don’t want to “spoil” the rest, but I will say that Vase de Noces contains a scene of an animal palpably grieving that is unlike anything I’ve seen in a film, and that its dirge-like climax contains a cyclical binge of coprophagia and vomiting that’s at once horrific and rather hilarious.
Zéno, also credited cinematographer, shot the film on black-and-white short ends snagged from an American army base, and co-wrote the scenario with Dominique Garny, who stars, and who would later co-direct another movie I adore, 1979’s Des Morts, with Zéno and Jean-Pol Ferbus, assistant director on Vase de Noces. M. Zéno had died in 2017, but Ruben managed to secure us his personal print of the film by getting in touch with his son and daughter in Brussels, who drove down for the screening, and were very sweet about the whole thing, seemingly touched that two disheveled Americans were so enthusiastic about their father’s work.
The print was gorgeous. There were, nevertheless, a fair number of walk-outs during the screening, which Sean and I could track from our place in the front row, because the seats at Studio Skoop—my favorite cinema in Ghent, seen above—are pretty noisy. I hope the people who stuck around got something out of the movie, because Zéno was a real-deal artist; Amos Vogel, author of Film as a Subversive Art, wrote of Zéno that “he probes, as all true subversives do, the outer reaches of human existence, the borderlands we dread yet must explore before we can finally feel the full measure of our human-ness.” This was in reference to Des Morts, but I fancy it applies just as well to his anguished portrait of zoophilia.
Anyways, a few minutes into the screening, after the first few squeaking seats, I leaned over to Sean and whispered “You know this is what we do everything for, right?” and he whispered back “I know.”