Supernova
2022 · 10m · USA
Directed by Jacob Kessler
Genres: documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An aging former Club Kid named Astro — a nomadic crust-punk who spent years squatting — drifts back into NYC queer nightlife. The doc shadows her through accusations over a lost brooch and idle afternoons in Union Square.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Club Kid documentary that doesn't fetishize the corpse of that scene but follows a survivor who's still drifting — yes, vault it. Michael Alig appears; that alone makes it historical.
A subject who is both a footnote of 90s nightlife history and a living person failing to find her footing in 2022 is exactly the kind of complicated doc subject I value, and Kessler's verite intimacy doesn't flinch from contradiction. Late Wojnarowicz energy.
Subject is both a 90s nightlife footnote and a living person still failing to find her footing in 2022 — that double-frame is the doc's whole engine, and letting her uninhibited stream of thoughts veer into the racist/homophobic is brave editing. Honest portraiture.