L for Leisure

March 22, 2015 · Knoxville Museum of Art · 2:00 p.m.

In the early 1990s, a group of students spend a sunny vacation waterskiing, arguing, making love, and, most of all, talking. They talk about everything from race wars to the skills of Michael Jordan to the philosophical implications of the end of time, as they hedonistically while away their youth.

L for Leisure is a film steeped in early ’90s nostalgia. It is a dialogue-driven, evocative work that takes its inspiration from the oeuvre of Hal Hartley, Whit Stillman and Eric Rohmer, while also drawing heavily on the TV of the era, from Twin Peaks and The X-Files to Melrose Place and Baywatch.

Featuring filmmakers Gabriel Abrantes and Mati Diop in front of the camera, and buoyed by John Atkinson’s (of avant rock group Aa) original chillwave soundtrack, this debut feature from Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn is, in their words, “a friendly satire of the dress, behaviours and habits of intellectuals at rest.” – Melbourne International Film Festival description

“An episodic period comedy set in the early ’90s and shot on 16mm, L for Leisure is the kind of American independent film you rarely see anymore: hand-crafted over four years, idiosyncratically stylized, and made totally out of step with current trends, it has more in common with Gen X indies like Slacker (1991) and Metropolitan (1990) than with the exponents of mumblecore.” – Cinema Scope