The voice behind ‘Elijah Footfalls’

Young Chang

Gabriel Judet-Weinshel originally wrote about 50 lines of dialogue in

his script “The Broken Wings of Elijah Footfalls.”

He then edited out almost everything, leaving just eight lines of the

spoken word.

Wednesday, the small-budget film is being screened as a mostly silent

movie in the Newport Beach Film Festival’s features lineup. The work,

which was inspired by the magic realism genre, Fellini’s stylings and the

work of Charlie Chaplin, relies heavily on images of a dusty,

sullenly-pastel world that emanates something magical.

Red balloons make characters fly. A fire breather falls in love with

Elijah Footfalls, the lead, as both are part of a ratty, vagabond circus.

Someone with what looks like wooden, awkward wings flies across the

ocean. Flaming chariots get wheeled through the streets.

“The film is very autobiographical,” said the screenwriter, director,

music composer and actor for the movie. “And it’s both very metaphorical

and mythical.”

Judet-Weinshel first thought to make “Broken Wings” six years ago

while living the roaming-artist way in Paris after graduating from high

school. The Berkeley native lodged in a little garret and took acrobatic

and dance classes.

“It was almost a classically difficult time for an 18-year-old,” said

the 24-year-old graduate of New York’s Sarah Lawrence College. “I had a

very romanticized view of the expatriate artist and I was reading

probably way too many existentialist texts at the time and not

understanding most of them.”

It was in Paris that he started getting images of an Icarus figure

flying over the ocean.

After a year abroad, he returned to the United States,

street-performed in Seattle for awhile and started developing what later

became “Broken Wings.” Like his main character, Judet-Weinshel is a

longtime juggler and unicyclist and is familiar with the circus circuit.

In “Broken Wings,” Elijah Footfalls is a street juggler who joins a

wandering circus in a valley. The film delves into each character’s

psyches and includes a love story between Elijah and Nina, the fire

breather.

“It’s essentially about someone growing up and learning how to love

other people,” Judet-Weinshel said. “It’s a very thinly-veiled

autobiography. It’s about a period in my life I feel I’ve moved through.”

The screenwriter admits that the script was sparse in dialogue to

begin with because he’s more of a visual and musical filmmaker than a

writer.

“For me, film and music are so intimately tied that dialogue is

something I almost tried to shove in at the end,” he said. “And really, a

lot of the dialogue was lousy dialogue. It felt self conscious and

preachy.”

But Judet-Weinshel does have a passion for image-driven films. Images

are essential to the medium and haven’t been fully explored in its

breadth, he said.

George Nicholas, cinematographer for “Broken Wings” and a Sarah

Lawrence instructor who once taught Judet-Weinshel, said shooting without

sound was easier, in one sense, because it was technically simpler.

“But you really did have to push it with the image,” said Nicholas,

who describes the style of cinematography as “lyrical.” “We didn’t want

you to be able to ever place it in time. We wanted it sort of to live in

its own world.”

For Judet-Weinshel, whose films have been shown at the San Francisco

Film Festival, MTV, the Northwest Film Festival and others, low-budget

films are an effective way to bring viewers into new, sometimes strange

worlds.

“Essentially, I want to make films that make the world a better place

in as small a way or as large a way as I can,” he said. “I feel the

medium is such a powerful way of doing that. People, for better or for

worse, don’t read a lot of books anymore.”

FYI

* What: “The Broken Wings of Elijah Footfalls”

* Where: Edwards Island 2, 999 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach

* When: 9:30 p.m. Wednesday

* Cost: $7

* Contact: (949) 253-2880 or o7 www.newportbeachfilmfest.com

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