The Curator's Eye

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle
A film by David Russo
Selected by Carl Spence, artistic director, 35th Seattle International Film Festival

Seattle International Film Festival

David Russo is one of those true originals. This film, his first feature, is hard to explain, because the premise is so outrageous and unlike anything you’ve seen before. There is a bizarre experiment involving incredible cookies that simulate oven freshness in your mouth. As they warm, they produce spectacular visions and mood swings, and then cause pregnancies in the male janitors who eat them.

David was a night janitor for eleven years, and he’s fascinated by the denizens of that demimonde, many of them intellectuals, artists and people in their own world. David is very much is in his own world, but he still manages to succeed in the real world. He’s won awards all over the planet (including an Emmy) and has experienced both sides of the film festival world: he has juried a festival in France and had three of his films official Sundance selections (winning an Honorable Mention for his adaptation of Robert Frost’s poem Pan with Us).

The French Ministry of Culture bought his film I Am (Not) Van Gogh, and Filmmaker magazine named him one of twenty-five New Faces of Independent Film. He’s also done music-video work for Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

He creates some of the most interesting animation there is, occasionally using a stop-motion animation camera from the ’50s. His animated film Populi is on permanent display at Qwest Field.

In Dizzle, he animates what the pregnant janitors give birth to — beautiful little blue fish. There’s a message: when things are beyond control, you just have to accept them. That may be how David’s life is, and that’s what his film represents. I’m sure this was a very difficult film to make. People might say, “What the hell is this?” But if you come to the Seattle International Film Festival and see it, you may become a David Russo fanatic. — CARL SPENCE