Goodbye Southside

A woman reflects on her family history as she leaves the neighborhood where she grew up

Director’s Statement

I wanted to make a film that focused on teenagers who had grown up in South Williamsburg and thus who had lived through the intense economic and demographic changes the neighborhood has undergone in the past two decades. I was interested in the ways these shifts impacted their formative years — how these external changes registered in their inner lives. Knowing this couldn’t be accomplished using a traditional documentary form, I wanted to work more collaboratively than I had in the past.

Initially my idea was to find a small group of young people interested in filmmaking. Working with them, as well as with my UnionDocs colleagues Anthony Simon and Beyza Boyacioglu, we would workshop an idea for a short fictional film based on aspects of their lives that they would co-write and perform, and which I would direct. However, this initial concept changed when we met Emony Sabria Jones and decided to work with her alone.

Emony was in many ways the ideal collaborator. She was intelligent, self-reflective, and interested in writing and performing. She was also at a pivotal time in her life. Her senior year of high school was coming to an end, and she was preparing to move away from her close-knit family in South Williamsburg to attend college the following year. We decided our collaboration would focus on her experience of this transitional moment.

Our process over the next few months was exploratory and open-ended. Emony and I met regularly to discuss what was happening in her life and to brainstorm how to portray this in our film (these meetings were filmed by Beyza and Anthony). I gave her a series writing prompts asking her to imagine what her life would be like at various points in the future and also what her mother and grandmother were experiencing at various points in their pasts. We constructed scenes to shoot that were inspired by these writings, and we also documented some of her life at home, at school, and around the neighborhood.

The project became a kind of collaborative portrait of Emony at this particular moment in her life. Our time was limited by her imminent departure, but I think the resulting film, brief as it is, effectively captures something of Emony’s state of mind during the time we spent with her. Goodbye Southside is intimate but also tentative, fragmentary, and subjective. As a portrait of a young woman still discovering herself, made by filmmakers who were just getting to know her, this seems entirely appropriate.”

— MICHAEL VASS

Team

Michael Vass

Michael Vass

Michael Vass is a filmmaker and writer based in New York. His award-winning films have screened at festivals and galleries, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. He was the 2012 winner of the Canadian Art Foundation Writing Prize, and his writings have appeared in Cinema Scope, Cineaction, Canadian Art, C Magazine, MACHETE, and The Rusty Toque. Michael received his BFA from Simon Fraser University and his MFA from York University. He’s an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Directors’ Residency.

Anthony Simon

Anthony Simon

Anthony Simon works with fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, music production, and street art. He works professionally as a freelance video editor with clients including Maysles Films, The Guardian, and The Yes Men. Simon received his BA at The Evergreen State College and was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow. He is currently developing a feature-length documentary about his family’s involvement in the major industries of Kauai, Hawaii. The story begins with his Great Grandfather’s immigration from the Philippines to work in sugar production.

Beyza Boyacioglu

Beyza Boyacioglu

Beyza Boyacioglu is a documentary filmmaker, video artist and curator from Turkey. She was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow, where she co-directed Toñita’s. She curates Fiction-Non, a documentary series exploring narrative/non-fiction hybrid films at Maysles Cinema in New York. Her work as a video artist has been exhibited at MoMA (New York), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), NoteOn (Berlin), and Sakip Sabanci Museum (Istanbul). Boyacioglu is currently based in Boston where she is pursuing a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and works as a researcher at the Open Doc Lab.

Michael Vass

Michael Vass

Michael Vass is a filmmaker and writer based in New York. His award-winning films have screened at festivals and galleries, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. He was the 2012 winner of the Canadian Art Foundation Writing Prize, and his writings have appeared in Cinema Scope, Cineaction, Canadian Art, C Magazine, MACHETE, and The Rusty Toque. Michael received his BFA from Simon Fraser University and his MFA from York University. He’s an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Directors’ Residency.

Anthony Simon

Anthony Simon

Anthony Simon works with fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, music production, and street art. He works professionally as a freelance video editor with clients including Maysles Films, The Guardian, and The Yes Men. Simon received his BA at The Evergreen State College and was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow. He is currently developing a feature-length documentary about his family’s involvement in the major industries of Kauai, Hawaii. The story begins with his Great Grandfather’s immigration from the Philippines to work in sugar production.

Beyza Boyacioglu

Beyza Boyacioglu

Beyza Boyacioglu is a documentary filmmaker, video artist and curator from Turkey. She was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow, where she co-directed Toñita’s. She curates Fiction-Non, a documentary series exploring narrative/non-fiction hybrid films at Maysles Cinema in New York. Her work as a video artist has been exhibited at MoMA (New York), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), NoteOn (Berlin), and Sakip Sabanci Museum (Istanbul). Boyacioglu is currently based in Boston where she is pursuing a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and works as a researcher at the Open Doc Lab.

Credits

Directed and co-written by Michael Vass

Co-writer/performer: Emony Jones
Producer and sound recordist: Anthony Simon
Cinematographer: Beyza Boyacioglu

UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Director: Toby Lee

UnionDocs Artistic Director: Christopher Allen

2012-2013 Collaborative Fellows: Andrew Hinton, Anthony Simon, Beyza Boyacioglu, Constanza Mirré, Emilia Bilińska, Federica Sasso, Jen Epstein, Maria Rosa Badia, Michael Vass, Parul Wadhwa, Sebastian Diaz Aguirre, Shannon Carroll, Tamer Hassan

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