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Inside The Furry World of Brett Hanover’s Radical Documentary Rukus

Morgan Jon Fox and Alanna Stewart in Rukus

[I first wrote about Brett Hanover’s radical documentary Rukus for last year’s Indie Memphis cover story. The film went on to win Best Hometowner Feature at the festival. Now, to celebrate its online release, the film gets an encore Indie Memphis screening at Studio on the Square on Wednesday, October 16th at 7 p.m.

Hanover’s full interview for the cover story last year was brilliant, so I have expanded my original story with new quotes about this remarkable film and the decade-long journey of self-discovery that produced it.]

Brett Hanover’s first documentary short “Above God” premiered at Indie Memphis 2006. The subject of “Above God” was Gene Ray, who became one of the first internet celebrities when his strange website filled with borderline nonsensical ramblings about a “Time Cube” went viral. “I was interested in internet cultures,” says Hanover, who was 16 years old when he made the film. “I was interested in how this one guy’s words got spread and interpreted by so many people.”

Another internet subculture that fascinated Hanover was that of furries, a small group devoted to dressing up in elaborate costumes that transformed them into anthropomorphic animals. Back then, furries were picked out for ridicule as weirdos with an incomprehensible sexual fetish. But Hanover saw something deeper in their endless Livejournal posts and secretive conventions.“As it evolved, and as it opened up to the internet, it became less focused on anthropomorphic comic books and more focused on having your own anthropomorphic avatar that people were playing online or with costumes. Then it became the site of identity play. Without being directly connected with mainstream LBGTQ culture, it got people thinking about their identities in the same way, almost in parallel. Now there’s a ton of crossover there. It’s interesting, because it used different kind of artwork, different ways of representing the body, different identity. It got to a similar place.

“The characters in furrydom are similar to other ways of using masks or clown personae throughout history. This is in the in-between space. Furries aren’t usually dressing up purely as a character, it’s a character based on you. You’re not dressing up as a Disney character. There’s an element of, ‘it’s me, but it’s not me.’ There’s also an element that is very tactile, but you’re playing a cartoon. It’s somewhere between performance and puppetry, between being the subject and being the object. It’s right on that boundary that a lot of theater traditions dance on.”

A mutual friend introduced him to a person in the online furry community who called himself Rukus. “Initially, when I first met him, I had a lurid fascination with what he was writing, because it was really intense, personal and raw. I was totally enamored of that. It was a way for me, someone who — as a teenager — had a lot of hangups around things that were sexual, a way to look at furry and exploring it vicariously through his life as a documentary filmmaker at age 17. When I say I am a documentary filmmaker, what does that mean at that point? It means a way to relate to somebody at a distance. I also think I had a crush on him.”

But Hanover soon discovered that Rukus was different things to different people. Little of his life story checked out, and he maintained a number of conflicting online personae.“It became an interesting mystery, to figure out what was real and what was embellished…If he’s not telling the truth about something, that means he’s not telling the truth about it for a reason. It says something about him.”

Director Brett Hanover

Hanover and Rukus became online friends, and even met in person after a Memphis furry convention. But eventually they drifted apart, and in 2008, Hanover got word that Rukus had committed suicide. “He was a survivor of trauma, he had been struggling with mental health issues his whole life,” Hanover says. “I became very obsessed with finding every trace of him online.”

In 2008, Hanover, with the help of his collaborators Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan, set out to make a documentary about Rukus and the online world where he had found connection. But Rukus could not be a conventional film. “The more I read through all his things, the more I wanted to tell the story from my perspective, and have it be very clear that this is a partial view of Rukus. That view is very much skewed, but it at least shows the audience the way it’s skewed…If I’m going to make a documentary about someone else that’s really personal, I need to do the same thing with myself. I had not done that, put myself into my other films.”

Hanover continued to work on Rukus for a decade, a time in which he went to college and became a teacher of film and media. “I never gave up. I despaired and agonized plenty. I feel like there’s ways in which the film took too long, just by virtue of being a perfectionist, and moving across the country for a new job, and stuff like that. But there’s also ways in which it needed to take that much time…Having a few years distance on things really helped. There was an outline in the beginning, but it was being written as it went along. Early on, I did an interview with Rukus’ boyfriend, and wrote and shot some scenes based on that. Some of them didn’t work out that well, so a few years later I interviewed Rukus’ boyfriend again and told him what had gone wrong with those scenes, and asked him to reflect on that. Then I wrote more scenes based on that. It became a feedback process with the subjects.”

Hanover and Stewart co-wrote and acted in many of the staged sequences, some of which reflected the ups and downs of their own relationship “During the time we were shooting, part of the time we were in a relationship, and part of the time we weren’t in a relationship any more, but we were still friends and collaborators. It was a lot of stuff like, we just worked through something in our relationship, and now we’re going to write a scene about it, and play out the scene, and now we realize that something else is wrong with the scene, and that something is also wrong in real life. It turned into a psychodrama for a couple of years.”

The finished film is a kaleidoscope of documentary and narrative, sincere and put-on, real and fake. “The reason it’s like that is that everyone who is in it has different personae, who are all sort of real depending on what media they’re using to communicate, or who their audience is. Rukus had all these different characters that he would use. I think now, there’s more of a sense of, here’s your real identity, and if you’re pretending to be something else online, that’s fake. Back then, it was understood that these different facets of you would be expressed through different identities.

“I think the closest you can get to capital-T Truth in a documentary is to show your perspective. Give people a sense of your own biases, of how the thing you’re watching is being framed. Making myself into a character is a way of doing that, as opposed to saying that this is the story of Rukus. Which it’s not. It’s the story of Rukus told by this kid who was still figuring out his own story.”

Rukus (Trailer) from Brett Hanover on Vimeo.

Inside The Furry World of Brett Hanover’s Radical Documentary Rukus

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High School Magic and a Pam Grier Double Feature this Weekend at the Cinema

Pam Grier as Jackie Brown

Saturday is packed with cinematic treats this week.

First, at 10 a.m., a rare screening of a Memphis classic at Malco Studio on the Square. When What I Love About Concrete won the 2013 Best Hometowner Feature at Indie Memphis, it had been in production for several years. Filmmakers Brett Hannover, Alanna Stewart, and Katherine Dohan began the project while they were still in high school at White Station. As I said in my Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits article about the film, everyone thinks they should make a movie about the high school experience, but these folks actually did it, and their movie is much cooler than yours would have been. Somewhere between Sixteen Candles and A Wrinkle In Time, What I Love About Concrete is a must-see. And if you, or someone you know, is in grades 7-12, you can see it for free, and have a pizza lunch with the filmmakers, courtesy of the Indie Memphis young filmmakers program! Click here to sign up.

High School Magic and a Pam Grier Double Feature this Weekend at the Cinema

Then at sunset, the Time Warp Drive-In kicks off its sixth season with a tribute to actress Pam Grier. Quick, what’s the best Quentin Tarantino movie? Time’s up! It’s Jackie Brown,  the Elmore Leonard adaptation QT wrote for Grier in the mid-90s. And there’s no better place to see it than the Malco Summer Drive-In.

High School Magic and a Pam Grier Double Feature this Weekend at the Cinema (2)

Then, Grier’s breakthrough performance, the 1973 blackspoitation flick Coffy, in which she is an incredible bad ass.

High School Magic and a Pam Grier Double Feature this Weekend at the Cinema (3)

Get out and see some flicks this weekend! 

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Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks

After a pause caused by the festival itself, here’s the next-to-last installment of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits, where we count down the winners of the Best of Indie Memphis poll. You can get caught up with part one, part two, and part three.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011)

Paradise Lost directors Joe Berlinger (left) and Bruce Sinofsky (right) pose with Jason Baldwin (center).

The West Memphis Three case is one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. But if it weren’t for a couple of struggling directors pitching a true crime documentary to HBO in the early 1990s, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly would still be in jail for a crime they didn’t commit. Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger’s came to the Mid South asking, how could three normal teenagers commit such a gruesome crime? But once they got here, they quickly became convinced that the accused were innocent. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills would prove to be one of the most consequential documentaries ever, and has influenced a generation of works from Serial to True Detective. Berlinger and Sinofsky followed the case for 18 years, and when new DNA evidence came to light, their cameras were there. In 2011, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory had its second public screening at Indie Memphis weeks after the West Memphis Three walked free. When Jason Baldwin walked onstage unannounced at the Q&A, it was one of the most electric moments in Indie Memphis history. Later that year, the film was nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards.

Undefeated (2011)

The same film beat Paradise Lost 3 at both  the Oscars and Indie Memphis’ documentary category that year. Undefeated was directed by Daniel Lindsey and T.J. Martin told the story of the Manassas High School Tigers and their coach Bill Courtney as they attempt to turn around their school’s historic losing streak on the football field. Today, Undefeated remains a sports movie staple.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks

Antenna (2012)

The Memphis punk scene started in January 1978, when the Sex Pistols played at the Taliesyn Ballroom—now the site of the Taco Bell on Union Avenue. A bunch of kids who thought they were the only ones listening to punk rock in Memphis found each other that night. Months later, some of them descended on The Well, a down-on-its-luck country western bar a few blocks from the Taliesyn, on Madison Avenue. In 1981, The Well became Antenna, the most radical music venue in the south. For the next fourteen years, Antenna was a haven for freaks and the home of new music in Memphis. National bands like R.E.M., Black Flag, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Green Day played at Antenna years before they were filling arenas. It was ground zero for Memphis’ alternative creative explosion that flew under the national radar while spawning groups like Panther Burns, Pezz, The Oblivians, The Grifters, and Jay Reatard—just to name a few.

When I was approached by Ross Johnson and John Floyd about making a documentary about Antenna and the music scene that thrived there, I knew it was something the Memphis community sorely needed. But I balked at the opportunity. I worried about the availability of archival footage. Antenna existed before the age when everyone had a cameraphone in their pockets. Would there be tape of bands like The Modifiers playing at Antenna? Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Antenna owner Steve McGehee knows everybody. By the time Antenna premiered at Indie Memphis in 2012, we had amassed more than 100 hours of vintage video, hundreds of still images, and 88 interviews, some of which were three hours long.

It’s difficult for me to talk about Antenna today. After winning the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at Indie Memphis 2012, we have tried in vain for years to find finishing funds to pay for the music licensing fees. I am extremely grateful that enough people remembered Antenna to vote it onto the list. Hopefully one day, everyone can see it. Until then, this is the only bit of untold Memphis music history I can share with you:

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (2)

Very Extremely Dangerous (2012)

One of the highlights of Indie Memphis 2017 was Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell proclaiming Friday, November 3 Best of Enemies Day. Director Robert Gordon, who helped originate the project he co-directed with Morgan Neville, has had a long and distinguished career as a writer and director before winning an Emmy for Best of Enemies. In 2012, a film he produced with Irish director Paul Duane made waves at Indie Memphis. Very Extremely Dangerous opens with Gordon and Duane almost getting in a car wreck with their subject Jerry McGill, a 70 year old junkie, criminal, and Memphis musician. McGill had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he brought along Duane and Gordon’s camera to record his final comeback performance/crime spree. To call Very Extremely Dangerous a harrowing watch is a dramatic understatement, but somehow, McGill comes out of it as a sympathetic character.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (3)

Keep The Lights On (2012)


Memphis-born Ira Sachs has long been one of the most intimate and truthful directors of the indie era. He got his start in the Bluff City before Indie Memphis got rolling with The Delta, an autobiographical coming-of-age story. In 2005, when Hustle & Flow won the audience award at Sundance, Sachs’ film Forty Shades of Blue won the Grand Jury Prize. Keep The Lights On is the story of an extremely dysfunctional relationship between Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul (Zachary Booth), a filmmaker and lawyer living in Sach’s adopted home of New York who can’t help but bring out the worst in each other. Sachs keeps the audience’s expectations vacillating between “I hope these two kids can get it together in the end” and “They need to stay the hell away from each other.” It’s a story about the joys and limits of romantic love.

Keep The Lights On was the first film in a trilogy of sorts from Sachs about trying to stay human while living in New York. 2014’s Love Is Strange stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a pair of longtime partners whose love is finally legal, but who are unexpectedly ripped apart after they finally tie the knot. 2016’s Little Men is a story Sach says was inspired by his Memphis childhood about friendship between kids from different social classes who find their lives disrupted by the creeping gentrification of Brooklyn. Sachs’ work is humane, beautiful to a fault, and absolutely required viewing for Memphis film fans.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (4)

What I Love About Concrete (2013)

Remember when you were in high school and thought, “We should make a movie about our crazy lives!” Well, Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan actually did it, and their film is probably much better than yours would have been. The two White Station High Schoolers, with the help of Brett Hanover, created a home grown, magical realist masterpiece—imagine if Pretty In Pink had been written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Morgan Rose Stewart (sister of the director) stars as Molly, a woman who finds herself growing very-not-metaphorical wings in her senior year, just as she is preparing for college and the big essay contest. The practical special effects and handmade animation sequences carry considerable visual punch, but it’s the unmannered acting and wild expanse of it all that elevates What I Love About Concrete to the level of the sublime. The film won at Indie Memphis, and has the distinction of being Commercial Appeal movie writer John Beifuss’ only acting credit.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (5)

“I Wanted To Make A Movie About A Beautiful and Tragic Memphis” (2013)

“I sometimes find it easier to reveal intimate details about myself through art. This is prime example” says Laura Jean Hocking. After spending years locked in a small dark room with me editing Antenna, Hocking wanted to do something completely different. She wrote, produced, and directed this Midtown memoir completely by herself. It is at once a celebration of place, a confession, and a series of visual experiments. Hocking collaborated transatlantically with Memphis expat musician Jimi Enck, who scored the film while living in London.

At the 2017 Indie Memphis festival, Hocking and her co-director Melissa Anderson Sweazy won Best Hometowner Feature and the Audience Award for their documentary Good Grief about kids who have experienced tragedy and the counsellors who help them at the Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief in Collierville.

I WANTED TO MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT A BEAUTIFUL AND TRAGIC MEMPHIS from oddly buoyant productions on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (6)

Short Term 12 (2013)

By 2013, Indie Memphis’ profile had risen high enough to land the biggest films on the festival circuit. Destin Daniel Cretton’s film Short Term 12, loosely inspired by his time as a counsellor in a group home for troubled teens, swept the Independent Spirit Awards and launched the career of Brie Larson. As one of the biggest vote-getters in the poll, it remains a favorite of Indie Memphis audiences.

It Felt Like Love (2013)

Here’s a little story that tells you what film festival life is like. In 2013, I was on the screening committee for Indie Memphis. We were tasked with finding the eight best features out of the hundreds of applicants that flood into Indie Memphis every year. Late in the season, we had whittled the list down to about a dozen when we noticed that no female directors were represented on the short list. Since it was pretty inconceivable that, in 2013, no women had made and submitted a decent movie, we dug back into the pile of DVDs. At the bottom was It Felt Like Love by Eliza Hitman, and when we popped it into the player, we were absolutely riveted. It was clear that this coming of age film was by far the best thing we had seen that year, and we almost lost it in the shuffle. Later, at the festival, the judges (who are not members of the screening committee) agreed, and It Felt Like Love won 2013’s Best Narrative Feature award.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (7)

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Music Video Monday: Katherine Dohan and Fantastic Paths

This Music Video Monday is stuffed with stuffing. 

You’ll be surviving the week on leftovers from Thanksgiving. Memphis musician/filmmaker Katherine Dohan understands how you feel. Although she’s currently ensconced in Los Angeles, the co-director of What I Love About Concrete hasn’t forgotten about her hometown. “Time for Thanksgiving” is a funny, proggy meditation on coming home for the holiday. 

Music Video Monday: Katherine Dohan and Fantastic Paths

“Time for Thanksgiving” opens with an ad from Fantastic Paths, everyone’s favorite, vaguely creepy mail order infomercial house turned band. As a bonus, here’s Dohan’s instant classic comedy short that launched Fantastic Paths, “Soda Chair”: 

Music Video Monday: Katherine Dohan and Fantastic Paths (2)

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Ben Siler: Collected Short Films

“I would like to give you an Easy Riders, Raging Bulls story, something involving violence or drugs,” filmmaker Ben Siler says, referring to Peter Biskind’s infamous book about the wild times of 1970s Hollywood. “But that hasn’t really happened.” Without million dollar budgets and the attendant debauchery, Siler has been working steadily for the past decade on a series of experimental short films and music videos that have earned him a reputation among the Memphis film community as a unique talent.

Katherine Dohan in Ben Siler’s short film ‘Prom Queen’.

“I’ve really respected and been inspired by his work for a long time,” says Brett Hanover, a fellow Memphis filmmaker who assembled and released the best of Siler’s work on a new DVD. “He’s a really dedicated artist, but he’s been so focused on producing his films that they just haven’t been seen. Even when they did screen at film festivals, they were so odd that they kind of got lost in the shuffle. I think they’re much more along the lines of video art, but they’re getting seen by the film community, not by the arts community.”

Siler and Hanover both got their start as filmmakers at the Memphis Digital Co-Op, a film collective founded in 2001 by Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson. At a time when digital video promised to democratize the art of filmmaking, this group of video rebels taught each other to shoot, act, and edit and create new video languages. “The Media Co-Op was a big deal to me,” Siler says. “It was a place where I could show my work, and people responded to it.”

Hanover remembers the early days of the Co-Op as heady and wildly ambitious: “There was a lot of experimentation going on. People kind of found their niche and went into different directions.”

Siler often uses onscreen text to comment on his images.

But Siler, it seemed, was good at everything. He could write, act, shoot, and especially edit. One of his earliest works was “Prom Queen” starring Katherine Dohan, who would later go on to co-direct the award-winning What I Love About Concrete. “It’s one of my favorite Memphis films,” Hanover says. “It’s one of my favorite films, period. ‘Prom Queen’ is about adolescence, but it’s also [about] gender and sexuality and thinking about his own relationship to masculinity. He writes female characters really well. He puts himself in those characters, and draws from his own experience in a way that is very empathetic and thoughtful.”

Siler recalls that “Katherine Dohan was up for anything. I based a lot of that movie on my own history. I’m very proud that it ran on the Library Channel, and it made an impression on a bunch of people.”

Ben Siler in ‘New Moon In The Morning’.

As a performer, Siler is as fearless and deadpan as Buster Keaton. He begins “Latent” tied to a chair rehearsing a scene with actress Melissa Walker where she repeatedly slaps him in the face. “It’s intense,” says Hanover. “Just as a performer, he is incredible. It’s unbelievable how much he’s willing to make himself vulnerable.”

Siler says the deceptive simplicity of his films are the result of the biggest lesson he learned at the Co-Op. “Everyone is in the mindset of the Hollywood blockbuster, but we should be thinking of what we can do on the level where we’re at now and where we might always be.”

Katherine Dohan in ‘Prom Queen’

His music videos, four of which are collected on the DVD, are like editing master classes. For Snowglobe’s “Nothing I Can Do,” he stitches together scenes showing dozens of actors and non-actors doing ordinary things like pumping gas or drinking a beer, until the rush of images becomes overwhelming. “He’s playing with the medium of video, pushing the limits of what we can understand,” says Hanover. “He uses text and video to make us free-associate. It’s poetic. There’s a moment at the end of ‘Fantasy’ when Ben asks his partner, ‘Could you do something specific and small by which I’ll remember this moment for decades?’ She slowly twirls her hair, which may or may not be a response to the question. This is a central tension in Ben’s work — do we direct our lives or do we just assemble meaning from things that are specific and small?”

Siler says he is grateful that these films are getting a proper release.”There’s a lot of personal history in them. I’m happy for people to see the work,” he says. “It kind of shows that anybody can do it.”

Ben Siler: Collected Short Films (DVD) Available at Black Lodge Video or at BrettHanover.com/ben