2 of the most AMAZING people in the world.

MIRANDA JULY.......
Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. She grew up in Berkeley, California where she began her career by writing plays and staging them at an all-ages club. July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was published in 2007 and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her fiction has been printed in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. In 2002 July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher, and a companion book will be published by Prestel this fall. She wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. July recently debuted a new performance at The Kitchen (NY), and is currently working on her second movie. She lives in Los Angeles.

JONATHAN CAOUETTE

Armed only with a cheap video camera, consumer editing software, troves of home movie footage and less than $300, Jonathan Caouette made Tarnation, an experimental documentary about himself and his family. Gus van Sant and Jonathan Cameron Mitchell have championed the film, and Caouette’s already received more A-list festival invites than he knows what to do with. Andy Bailey investigates.

A product of the Houston suburbs, Caouette grew up in a family rife with dysfunction and mental illness. His beauty-queen single mother, Renée, floated in and out of hospitals battling schizophrenia while Jonathan was raised by his grandparents, whose own questionable sanity is examined at length in Tarnation. In one painful scene, Caouette films his grandmother, poststroke and toothless, rambling with a speech impediment. “As I approached my teens it became more of a compulsion to do it,” Caouette said of his urge to capture the darker aspects of his family’s plight on video. “I wanted to film my grandmother — she was really kooky and not like the other grandmothers. I wanted to film my mother. She has schizophrenia — she’s kooky too. It hit me like a brick wall in my teens that I was going to make this movie. And I was still making it up until about a year ago.”

Caouette stopped documenting his life after a devastating change in Renée’s condition — she suffered an overdose of lithium — prompted him to shut off the camera and start the editing process. By then Caouette had relocated to Astoria, Queens, to an apartment he shares with his boyfriend and mother. “I started using iMovie because it came with my boyfriend’s computer and was simple as hell [to use],” Caouette explains. Tarnation’s press-release-friendly budget can be itemized as follows: $149.47 for Hi-8 tapes, $33.57 for VHS tapes, $10.27 for a camera adapter and $25 for a pair of angel wings employed during a musical reenactment of Blue Velvet that Caouette once staged during his high school years. (The home computer was a gift to Caouette’s boyfriend.) Thus far the film has only been exhibited digitally at film festivals — a 35mm print would require additional production funds. But Tarnation’s major stumbling block on its laborious path to theatrical distribution isn’t its raw, home-movie quality but clearances for the music, which includes everything from Sinatra to moody numbers by Nick Drake and Low and which are crucial to the work’s sentimental veneer.

It’s ironic that a film originally created for less than the price of a plane ticket now has to obtain thousands of dollars in music clearances in order to move forward for distribution,” bemoans producer Stephen Winter in a recent interview. “But Jonathan’s amazing choice of songs is part of what makes Tarnation so extraordinary. Our goal is to retain as much of the music as possible without breaking the bank. If Paris Is Burning can get through this process with all those rare house tracks intact, we certainly can do it.”