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Kevin Jerome Everson is the director, writer, editor, cinematographer, and producer

on all films. Lin Qiu edited Spicebush. Joe Williams (New York) was the d.p. for Six
Positions. Tom Hayes (Columbus, Ohio) edited Avenues, Thermostat, Second Shift,
Merger and Six Positions. Austin Allen (Cleveland, Ohio,) edited Eleven Eighty-Two.
Poet Mark Halliday (Athens, Ohio) wrote Special Man. Poet Vincent Katz (New York)
wrote Fumble. Writer /Poet Nick Flynn wrote Blind Huber. Composer Derek Bermel
(Brooklyn) wrote and performed the music for Spicebush, Special Man and Fumble.
Musician David Reid (Brooklyn) performed the music for Spicebush and Pictures From
Dorothy.

 


 

 

Kevin Jerome Everson (filmmaker) was born and
raised in Mansfield, Ohio. He has made over twenty-five short films, four of which
have screened at Sundance (Eleven Eighty-Two '98, Imported '00, Vanessa '03,
Pictures From Dorothy '04). In 2005, his debut feature Spicebush, a mediation on
rhythms of work and the passage of time in Black American working class
communities, world premiered at the Rotter
dam International Film Festival and won
best documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival. Everson's photographs,
sculptures and films have exhibited internationally at museums and film festivals. A
recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome
Prize, Everson is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia. He is
currently developing the narrative feature Lowndes County (with playwright Talaya
Delaney) and is in pre-production on a film based loosely on Alessandro de’Medici.

 

 

 

 

Spicebush (2005, 73 minutes) is an experimental feature film that interweaves
various fragmentary narratives concerning education, landscapes, gaining and losing
a job, and the passage of time. The technique and style employed alternates between
the documentary, the symbolic, and more conventionally scripted scenes. Filming
individuals engaged in their careers conveys the documentary aspect. At a symbolic
level, the fossil is a leitmotif suggesting past and present. The title of the film refers to
the state butterfly of Mississippi, Spicebush Swallowtail. In the film, Mississippi is a
place of origin. The Spicebush Swallowtail represents renewal or starting over.
Throughout the film, a little girl appears in different guises and settings, functioning
indirectly in the role of the chorus. The scripted scenes, shot in a documentary style,
collaged with the other scenes begin to create the traces of a narrative structure.