Jonah Greenstein

BIOGRAPHIE

My journey as a gender-nonconforming artist working in film began when, in high school, I discovered that still cameras also take video. Taking other people’s pictures assuages the twinge of sentimentality and wordlessly signals one’s preference for observation. Recording motion pictures also starts a parallel timeline of post-production experimentation, and I grew accustomed to crafting intricate digital objects out of transient moments. While attending New York University, I wrote a story about sexual violence in my Iowa hometown. Its complexities inspired my honing of a conceptual cinema aesthetic that also tells a story. The process culminated in a thesis production featuring local nonprofessional talent. The work predicted the #MeToo sea change and was awarded several grants but ignored by the festival circuit. When I was hired on Laura Poitras’ Risk and Astro Noise, my diverse work-for-hire portfolio had prepared me to contribute to her updates to Warhol’s postmodern deconstruction of art, advertising, and celebrity. After Donald Trump was elected President, I began an investigation into the hospitality at the Bellevue Psychiatric Ward, where I watched the inauguration from the common room and tried to distinguish between paranoid delusions and the actual psychic toll of the surveillance state and post-truth politics. Afterward, gay chat apps became a site of intergenerational community and multidisciplinary creativity as I became interested in Friends, Relationships, Networking, and Right Now. I premiered my feature debut on the LGBTQ festival circuit. In 2020, I released it through First Run Features as Dedalus, a triptych which includes my thesis and derives its title from a screen name. The film was praised for its singular vision and patient observation of behavior. By that time, Martin H. Krieger had hired me to edit a book of his social science informed photography, and we eventually became partners. On 30 August 2021, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and I flew to Iowa to begin shooting my second feature. A two-part cinematic fugue, 6655 Mount Vernon Road takes its title from the address of a defunct television company office near where I grew up. In 2022, I distributed it in territories excluding the U.S. and proposed – to the Board of Governors at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – an American submission to Best International Feature at the 95th Oscars. In a press release to over 12,000 publicity contacts, I announced the proposal and explained that submitting the film would allow Academy members to view its entirety on the Academy Screening Room member site and choose whether to nominate. I included a twenty-four-second excerpt, in which the audience at a high school football game is asked to “please remember the valiant men and women who have served our country in defense of our liberties and values.” Members of the motion picture industry and representatives from other arts organizations signed letters in support of the initiative. We succeeded in getting All the Beauty and the Bloodshed nominated for Best Documentary. Resisting traditional modes of working allows me to subvert myths about the lay person, upward mobility, and the American dream. Utilizing narrative, documentary, and experimental techniques, I address themes such as consent, the loneliness of tokenism, loss, and existential complexities of victimhood and social justice. These documented memories evoke our shared humanity in a world increasingly fractured along ideological lines and thwarted by technology’s progress.

FILMOGRAPHIE