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Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens
Shorts: Character Study
Old Town Playhouse
Sun, Aug 2, 2015 12:00 PM
From national heroes to counterculture icons and all the eccentric personalities in between, this year’s documentary shorts program offers unique portraits from around the world. Despite using only a single camera setup, the brilliant “The Face of Ukraine” provides a cathartic examination of the effects of Ukraine’s recent conflict on the psyches of several young women and girls. In “Calls to Okies,” Ben Steinbauer (“Winnebago Man,” TCFF 2009) returns to the festival with a hilarious look at the legacy of an infamous underground prank caller. This year’s top doc award winner at Tribeca, the latest from TCFF alums Bryn Mooser and David Darg, looks at the Ebola epidemic in Liberia through the eyes of a courageous female body collector. And “Giovanni and the Water Ballet” is the charming story of a ten-year-old who wants to be the first boy to compete in the Dutch Synchronized Swimming Championships (and maybe flirt with girls in the pool while he’s at it).
This film is, among other things, an exploration of the work of Walter Potter, a quirky Victorian English taxidermist who posed his critters in human poses. The film is centered around 5 collectors who managed to salvage some of Potter’s works after they were broken apart from their original collection in 2003. More than a film about Potter himself, its central themes involve attention to detail, the need to acquire unique items, and the triumph and endurance of the spirit of individuality. Walter Potter : The Man Who Married Kittens is director Ronni Thomas’ follow up to his series of short films, “The Midnight Archive” (themidnightarchive.com), which explore the odd, the morbid, the uncanny and the truly unique.
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