Filmmaker Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli Visits Campus with “So Pretty” (2019)
The acclaimed director screened her innovative new work and met with experimental filmmaking students.
On December 9, 2019, the School of Film and Media Studies welcomed filmmaker Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli to campus to screen her acclaimed new film So Pretty (2019).
The film follows a transgender visual artist and her friends in New York City who struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel so schön by Ronald M. Schernikau.
So Pretty is Rovinelli’s second feature length film, which previously screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, IndieLisboa, BAMcinemaFest, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and FIDMarseille. Earlier this year she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, working as not only a film director, but also an editor, post-production colorist, and critic.
Prior to the screening, Rovinelli met with students in Joel Neville Anderson’s Experimental Workshop course to discuss their filmmaking processes and how theories of aesthetics and politics inform their work.
Following the screening and in-depth Q&A, Rovinelli commented, “I am so enamored with the audiences So Pretty draws—it is so exciting to be in a room of young people who are so perceptive and engaged time after time—you remind me of me and make me so hopeful for the future of ‘cinema’.”
