Director: Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
Year: 2020
Duration: 10 minutes
Category: Documentary Short
Language: English with English subtitles


A highly stylized, semi-documentary film about two people in an apartment, Rovinelli’s new short strips her earlier work to its barest essentials: two bodies, sexual intimacy, coffee, and written text read aloud. Here, the written text is an original piece by Kash, which cuts togethers texts by and about Christian martyrs with poetic love letters to Rovinelli in an attempt to make use the language of the Christian divine for the sake of its sensual and evocative powers, free it from its historical context. In the same breath, perhaps, it allows Kash and Rovinelli to exist as bodies in intimacy, without the weight of Rovinelli’s existence as a transgender woman or theirs as a lesbian couple. An image of domesticity reworked through cinematic technique, the film continues Rovinelli’s interest in film color in the most concerted way yet, letting red light bathe and blow out the image in slowly pulsing waves that push the edges of the eye and the camera’s ability to process red wavelengths. The short was shot digitally but was made with the intention of screening on 35mm, providing several layers of tactile intimacy with the film image itself and making its red frames particularly enveloping. Alongside a pulsating techno score by Brooklyn DJ and producer Ne/Re/A that never treads upon the video images, the film is an image of the ecstatic in film form that furthers Rovinelli’s interest in allowing us to approach flesh and history in new ways.