Here are the new trailers – red band and green band – for FLAMES directed by and featuring real-life couple Josephine Decker and Zefrey Throwell. Filmed over five years, FLAMES follows the couple from the white-hot passion of first love to the heartbreak of the bitter end.
Flames will World Premiere at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday, April 20.
High on their intense connection, the pair of artists document their relationship’s every beat, from their adventurous sex life, to their performance art collaborations, to a spur-of-the-moment getaway to the Maldives. But when the romantic vacation doesn’t exactly go as planned, the now-former couple are left to decide what to do with their film-in-progress, and for these two filmmakers, the end of the relationship isn’t the end of the story.
As they continue filming, reconstructing what happened and where it all went wrong, lines begin to blur between what was real and what was “the film”—if there’s even a difference anymore. Equal parts performance piece and penetrating rumination on the way some relationships are never finished even after they end, FLAMES is an extraordinary docu-art hybrid- a raw nerve of a film that finds within its unique idiosyncrasies and eccentricities a universally affecting manifesto of heartbreak.
The Couple: Josephine Decker and Zefrey Throwell
Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine Decker aims to spark curiosity and wonder in audiences while delving into the ways we classify ourselves and others. Part of Time Warner’s 150 incubator, a recent Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab Fellow and one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Josephine Decker premiered her first two narrative features, BUTTER ON THE LATCH and THOU WAST MILD AND LOVELY, at the Berlinale Forum 2014. The films were listed #2 and #10 on The New Yorker’s Top Ten List of 2014, played about a hundred festivals around the world (including Torino, London BFI, BAM Cinemafest), won Sarasota Film Festival’s Independent Visions Award, Tangerine Entertainment’s prize for a rising female director and many other awards. Her third narrative feature, starring Molly Parker and Miranda July, is currently in post-production, and this fall, she incubated a dance-theater-film hybrid at Princeton University with butoh choreographer Vangeline.
Interested in melding unconventional movement and dance into narrative film, Josephine spent a year in Pig Iron Theater’s Advanced Performance Training to learn theater-based techniques of collaborative writing. She is using that training to create Virtual Reality narratives, including one currently with Wolf Cinema in Berlin and another developed by Kaleidoscope VR, DevLab and The Sundance Institute.
Zefrey Throwell is a NYC based artist who uses the mediums of film, performance, photography and painting to orchestrate his inquisitive perspective. 1000 car horn symphonies, a weeklong strip poker critique of modern economics, a massive food fight- Throwell’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, CNN, NPR, NBC, Artforum, Art in America, Artinfo and Modern Painters. Throwell has work in The Museum of Modern Art and other major collections. His films have shown at the Cannes Film Festival and other festivals around the world. He is currently directing three feature films and organizing the longest choir in history- a 10,000 opera singer project that stretches over the alps from Italy to Germany, as well as a 10 cruise ship symphony surrounding Miami Beach. Throwell’s latest feature film “Flames” will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017.