Kevin Contento

Hierophany, Kevin Contento (2018)

Kevin Contento is a Colombian-American filmmaker who grew up in South Florida. A University of Central Florida alumnus, he majored in cinema studies with a minor in philosophy, religion, and popular culture, and earned his MFA in Screenwriting and Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Capturing life in Florida with non-actors in underserved communities, and evoking the mystical reality within, is his passion. Contento's thesis short from Columbia, Hierophany, premiered at Slamdance, Sarasota, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and the Caribbean Film Series - BAM Diaspora Shorts Program—his first feature film, The Conference of the Birds, explores the theme of divine unity in a hybrid documentary-drama aesthetic.

Kevin Contento participated in an exclusive interview with Filmatique as part of Talents 2020.

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FILMATIQUE: Hierophany unfolds over the course of a lazy afternoon in Belle Glade, a small town in South Florida, and involves a teenager's encounter with the divine.  What was your inspiration for this story, and can you tell us about your journey of bringing the film to life?

KEVIN CONTENTO: The inspiration for Hierophany is twofold: the art of falconry has been a long time interest, and several years ago I accompanied a falconer out to Belle Glade to watch him fly a peregrine falcon. On the car ride up the falconer asked me if I knew what a telemetry receiver looked like—eager to impress this stranger I lied and told him I did. During flight the peregrine flew out of sight, and the falconer, a man of extreme anxiety, yelled from across the fields to bring him the receiver. I don't remember what I grabbed, but it was the wrong thing. Things ended with the bird finally coming back, but from then on I carried with me the generative image of a falconer who lost his bird.

At first the script was too abstract, but with the help of my thesis advisor at Columbia we boiled things down into a palpable narrative: a boy who encounters the art of falconry for the first time. From there it was about researching Belle Glade and Pahokee, which is when the rabbit hunting tradition of rural Palm Beach county came to my attention. This was the second half of it; it was clear to me who our hero was, and why he would be in the fields.

It wasn't easy to persuade folks to join me, for example right before pre-production I had a creative disagreement with a producer and we parted ways. For a while I pushed ahead alone. In the end it was friends, old and new, who jumped onboard. Not sure why, but on paper Hierophany failed to get people's attention.

FLMTQ: The film was shot on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, which is associated not only with wildlife species but also with pollution from the sugar industry, which is causing blue-green algae to bloom along the coast of southern Florida.  What resonances, if any, do you see between the ecological damage for which this area has become increasingly known, and Hierophany's spiritual valences?

KC: Let me start with the emphasis of spirituality in Hierophany. My love for falconry led to the art form as it's seen and practiced in the Islamic world, which accounts for 50% of the world's falconers. The masters of both faith and poetry, the majority of them Sufis, use falconry imagery to express the esoteric relationship between a believer and the Creator. Even Dante Alighieri borrowed this allegory, which is found throughout The Divine Comedy.

Hierophany documents a spiritual awakening: the moment Aaron comes in contact with a symbolic language that's expressing a perennial truth. The Truth. I subscribe to this Truth, and it's thanks to scholars like Seyyed Hossein Nasr that we have such a thing as ecotheology. Nature is the theater for divine activity so it must be protected. In Hierophany, there is a right way of hunting, and then there's a senseless attitude toward nature which leads to excess and unnecessary death—depicted in the actions of the boy who not only shoots the innocent falcon, but proposes the theft.

Now the ecological issues attached to the sugar industry have an unfortunate, and unfair way of defacing the folks that make a living from it, and the towns built around these fields. I hear a lot about the damage, but nothing about curbing the demand for raw sugar, or organic sugar products across this country. Who is to blame? Without farms there wouldn't be food, plain and simple, and there wouldn't be a Hierophany. After all, it's the cane fields of a fourth generation farmer that you see in the film. I've been photographing in these parts since 2011, and I was never successful in getting a "yes" before this project. As a nothing-to-my-name filmmaker it's acts of kindness like these that speak volumes regardless of what else might be going on.

Hierophany, Kevin Contento (2018)

FLMTQ: The film features naturalistic performances from Jean Voltaire, Roy Thompson Jr., and Wiltavious Mckelton, who don't appear to have much other acting experience.  Can you discuss your casting process for this film, and how you worked with the actors on set to bring their characters to life?

KC: Working with those that are driven to do great work makes all the difference. Jean, Roy, and Boleg had no acting experience before this, but they had more willingness than all the actors I worked with while living in New York City. Our casting process consisted of meeting a group of high schoolers outside their football field and asking whether anybody had any interest in acting. This wasn't my first choice, but as things happen you work with the opportunities that come your way. In that group we found our main characters. I then spent time visiting everyone at their homes, meeting their guardians, and making sure that we were all on the same page. This established a great bond with all their parents. For example, to this day Jean's mom and I talk.

What made a world of difference in the end was rehearsing. We scheduled several rehearsals over the course of 2 months and this helped everyone get comfortable. What also helps is that Jean, Boleg, and Roy were friends, so that translated to how they worked with one another, and you can see that friendship onscreen. It was a first for me in many ways, but the best advice is to be honest with your cast and crew, don't be an obstacle be the solution, and to trust your actors. While filming the long shot where all three boys were walking toward the camera, I remember Jean's confidence, he said something like, "We got this, Kevin. We one and done."

FLMTQ: You have spoken about drawing inspiration from auteurs as diverse as Bresson, Bergman, Tarkovsky and Weerasethakul, in terms of how their films capture or communicate spiritual struggle.  What were the specific ideas or techniques from these filmmakers that most influenced you, and can you speak a bit about the inherent paradox of representing the sacred or intangible onscreen?

KC: Bresson's use of hands, objects, or hands holding objects, as tools for expressing character and emotion is crucial. Bergman is synonymous with spirituality so it is hard to pick one thing, but I will say that the opening to The Seventh Seal—those establishing shots with the music before characters are introduced were always on my mind. I must have looked at them several times while writing. Tarkovsky is a beast, he too tackles the inherent paradox of representing the sacred onscreen. While he tends to have dense dialogue between characters, which I knew wouldn't work in this case, there is still this essence to his images that evokes the intangible. I'm always finding something new in his films. Weerasethakul completely shattered my brain the first time. It's his knowledge of a symbolic language, which at its height is more akin to Sufi poetry than any of the other directors in this group. Nature is truly a stage for divine activity in his films. In the end, when you remember that the Sacred has been communicated for eons through symbols, that's when you can start to create a dialogue with other images and through their juxtaposition convey a story. I'm a baby when it comes to this, but I'm working on it.

FLMTQ: Are you working on any new projects, and if so, can you tell us a bit about them?

KC: Yes, I am. Currently we are in post-production on my debut feature, The Conference of The Birds. The project's namesake comes from the allegorical work by Sufi poet Farid Ud-Din Attar. In this film you'll see familiar faces like Jean, Boleg, and Roy, along with some new faces making their debut performance. The story unfolds through a series of vignettes, some of which are taken from Attar's work, while others are more a documentary snapshot of life on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. To give you a sense, it's Weerasethakul’s A Mysterious Object At Noon meets Pasolini's Arabian Nights.

This was a truly independent effort, I shot the film myself over two years using a Canon 5D and two lenses. There was no onset sound so over the last few months we've been ADR-ing the entire film. If anybody is interested I encourage them to check out our official website. We are applying for grants, and looking for investors to get us across the final hurdles of post-production.

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Interview by Ursula Grisham
Head Curator, Filmatique