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Filmmaker Cruz Angeles Makes Uncomfortable Art

One of our favorite films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Cruz Angeles’s beautiful debut feature, Don’t Let Me Drown. (We wrote about it here, here, and here. And we weren’t the only ones who liked it, either.) So we decided to delve into Angeles’s back catalogue, and discovered this short 2003 gem, which screened at about two dozen festivals and won a slew of awards. We should note that The Show is nothing like Don’t Let Me Drown. Whereas the new feature is a generous, lushly realistic look at young love in inner-city Brooklyn, the short is an incredibly dark, borderline-experimental silent film that begins with a lynching and then takes a rather startling turn. To say more would give away too much. Also, small-world alert: The final face we see in the film just happens to belong to Picture Palace alumnus Seith Mann, a director for The Wire, whose own short film Five Deep Breaths we featured last year.

Filmmaker Cruz Angeles Makes Uncomfortable Art