Lucia Small Obituary, Independent Film Festival Boston mourn Lucia Small passing

Lucia Small Obituary, Death – This is a huge loss for the movie industry in general and for the tight-knit Boston filmmaking community in particular, where Lucia Small had many close acquaintances and collaborated on successful projects. late director Lucia Small. Gulnara Niaz in a photo My Father, The Genius (2002), The Axe in the Attic (2007), One Cut, One Life (2014), and Girl Talk (2022), riveting, personal documentaries by Lucia Small that explored tragedy and resiliency with clarity, compassion, and humor, passed away on November 19. She had pancreatic cancer and was 59 years old. In particular, the close-knit local filmmaking community, where Small fostered many connections and productive partnerships, has suffered a great loss.

The news magazine program Living on Earth, the first of its kind on NPR, was launched and developed by Small when she first started her media career in public radio, showcasing her commitment to environmental issues. After becoming interested in cinema, she created a number of noteworthy programs for ITVS, PBS, and American Public Television, including Beth Harrington’s The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles (1995), Laurel Chiten’s The Jew in the Lotus (1997), and Katrina Brown’s Traces of the Trade (1999). (2008). But Small expertly cemented her individual voice and style with her feature directorial debut, My Father, The Genius (2002), as well as her understanding of the relationship between the intimate and significant, the ludicrous and the serious.

The title’s patriarch, Glen Small, told his daughter Lucia that he had remembered her in his will and asked her to write his biography. Instead, despite her reservations, Small concurred to produce a movie about his life. On the one hand, her father was a well-known architect who committed his career to “healing the world via building” and whose ideas resembled those of, instance, Buckminster Fuller in their revolutionary and futuristic vision. On the other side, he was a failure as a spouse, a womanizer, and a careless parent. And even though he was on the cusp of fame at the age of 31, by 61 he was headed for both professional and financial catastrophe. Due to his ego-driven conflicts with more renowned architects, his self-described genius had brought him to his knees.

Lucia Small excelled at the task. She navigated her father’s complicated existence by using a combination of compassion, irony, astute observation, and understanding. The film is similar to a nonfiction adaptation of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums in its delicate balancing act of silliness, gravity, and humanity (2001). For her next two projects, Small collaborated with veteran documentarian Ed Pincus, who gained notoriety while lecturing at MIT for creating the genre of personal nonfiction with his candid Diaries 1971–1976. Theirs would be Small’s most successful and significant partnership with a local director.

In their first movie together, The Axe in the Attic (2007), they were moved by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in 2005 and drove from New England to New Orleans with cameras in hand to see the storm’s aftermath firsthand. They quarreled frequently on the way, but eventually, the enormity of the catastrophe, the government response’s incompetence, and the exposed racial and economic injustices outweighed minor issues. What they saw led them to question the morality of making a film about other people’s tragedies, and they grappled with this moral conundrum in a similar way to James Agee in his book about poor Southern sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The title, for instance, refers to the axes that residents of New Orleans, guided by previous storm experience, have stashed in their attics to chop a hole in the roof to escape rising flood waters. As in all her films, Small displayed an eye for the telling, frequently devastating detail.

Lucia Small Obituary, Death – This is a huge loss for the movie industry in general and for the tight-knit Boston filmmaking community in particular, where Lucia Small had many close acquaintances and collaborated on successful projects. late director Lucia Small. Gulnara Niaz in a photo My Father, The Genius (2002), The Axe in the…