Memphis filmmakers usher ‘Rukus’ to SXSW Festival
Yes, Elvis was present, cinematically speaking. But a more unexpected Memphis materialization in Austin, Texas, this week occurred with the re-emergence of one of the city’s most promising young filmmakers, who brought a characteristically uncompromising work to the latest edition of the extremely hip and increasingly prestigious South by Southwest Film Festival.
On the SXSW schedule for March 11, 13 and 16, “Rukus” is the new feature from writerdirector Brett Hanover, working in collaboration with credited assistant directors Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan. The movie is screening in the “Visions” category, which, according to the ballyhoo of the festival program, is dedicated to “audacious, risktaking artists in the new cinema landscape who demonstrate raw innovation and creativity in documentary and narrative filmmaking.”
“It was a huge honor, and I really was not expecting to get into South by Southwest,” said Hanover, 29, whose self-financed film arrived in Austin with no distribution deal, no established indie-company associations and no advance buzz. “I almost did not submit.”
One of 15 films in the Visions division and one of close to 140 features at SXSW overall (the lineup includes the upcoming HBO doc, “Elvis Presley: The Searcher”), “Rukus” is described on the festival website as a documentary/fiction “hybrid” and “queer coming of age story” set in “the liminal spaces of furry conventions, southern punk houses, and virtual worlds.”
“Furry,” in this case, is a reference to the subculture of mostly young people who wear the costumes of anthropomorphized animals to interact — socially, recreationally and sometimes erotically — at conventions and on the Internet.
“In San Francisco, we had a big crowd of furries come in full costume,” said Hanover, whose movie debuted Feb. 2 at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. “And it’s a pretty serious movie, so it’s interesting to do a Q-and-A where people are asking very thoughtful questions, but they’re in a lion costume.”
More than a decade in preparation, “Rukus” was inspired by Hanover’s mostly online friendship with the title character, an Orlando artist and furry known as “Rukus” who hanged himself at the age of 22 in 2008.
Although Hanover at that time was only two years out of White Station High School, he already had directed two memorable, ingenious and liberatingly unbeholden-to-cinema-tradition documentaries, “The Bridge,” a stealth Scientology exposé, and “Bunnyland,” about a self-styled Indian chief and suspected pet rabbit executioner. He also was a close collaborator with White Station Spartan classmates-turned-feature directors Stewart and Dohan on the duo’s unclassifiable coming-of-age/coming-of-feathers magic-realist comedy, “What I Love About Concrete,” which debuted at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2013.
For Hanover, Rukus’ suicide left both a void and a weight. Rukus had been crafting a massive “world-building” graphic novel, according to Hanover, and had recorded “hours and hours of unedited video diaries,” among other revealing activities. Hanover, meanwhile, was working with Rukus on his own experimental documentary project about furries and other subcultures.
After Rukus’ death, Hanover felt a responsibility to continue the collaboration, so to speak. As he began gathering Rukus’ material, he started revisiting his own adolescent and teen years, collecting home movies, journals and other traces of himself, “scattered down the Internet” like pieces of blown tire on the highway.
“Rukus,” the 87-minute film that emerged from these excavations into personal history, the technological record and the artistic subconscious, is part documentary and part drama. It mixes found footage and animation adapted from Rukus’ art with recreations of fact-inspired events featuring such actors as Memphis filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox.
Said Hanover: “Part of the movie is about me, as a filmmaker, trying to figure out what’s true about the life story he (Rukus) left behind.” Complicating this quest is the idea that teenagers, according to Hanover, “are always performing and trying things out, especially on the Internet — everybody has a fictionalized version of yourself that you’re performing as.” This is true in a unique way in the furry community, whose participants adopt a particular animal “fursona” (in the