Dakota (Kota Johan) wants to leave a mark on New York before it can leave her in its tracks in “Tendaberry,” Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s sensational feature debut in which the same overwhelming feeling of a place of endless possibilities can be as enthralling as it is intimidating to those who live there. The film starts out as if it’s a tsunami, unfurling in a torrent of imagery that parcels out home movies from Dakota’s youth alongside the history of the metropolis she’s taken up residence in to suggest both are forces to be reckoned with. Blended into the mix are the video diaries of Nelson Sullivan, who compulsively chronicled his life in the city in the 1980s and when he wasn’t one to think he’d make history, he did so quite literally with a now-indispensable repository of footage that predates the ubiquity of cell phone cams. While Dakota isn’t the one holding the camera in “Tendaberry,” her life can reveal as much about where she lives as the character it brings out in her as she makes her presence known, refusing to be swept away when it can seem as if no one else is paying attention to your struggles, yet her plight reflecting so many others via Anderson’s sensitive lens.
The director shrewdly recasts notions of survival in the city from being a purely economic matter to one where as much as life can lead you in thrillingly unexpected directions, it can take brutal turns as well, not only in the course of the year that “Tendaberry” covers, but even in the course of a day. It isn’t
the unforgiving job at a discount store that supplements her career as a singer – or perhaps it can be seen the other way around when passing around a red paper bag after singing on the subway – or the eviction notice she finds in her door when her building is destined for redevelopment that threaten to plunge her underwater, but when her boyfriend (Yuri Pleskin), who could make her feel at home no matter what their circumstances were, is called back to his native Ukraine to take care of his father that make her surroundings suddenly seem foreign.
However, whatever potentially crushing blows are dealt to Kota, Anderson watches her throw haymakers right back, witnessing the resilience of its lead character while expressing her strength in muscular filmmaking. Criss-crossing between narrative and nonfiction work in recent years, often blurring lines in both realms with shorts such as “Pillars,” where constructed scenes gave way to the reality of the situation in riveting fashion, the director lets the natural rhythms of life propel “Tendaberry” forward, catching intimacy with its increasingly withdrawn heroine as she becomes less willing to put herself out there emotionally. Whether or not Dakota can take the world by storm, “Tendaberry” seems poised to and as it premieres this week at the Sundance Film Festival, Anderson spoke about how she crafted such a vibrant evocation of life in the city, developing a directing style with space built in for spontaneity and how the film itself came as a surprise to her as her feature debut.
How did this come about?
It came about in little pieces. I was working on this other film and then the pandemic happened, and it [became] impossible to make, and I’m still making it, but at the time, there was just no way to move forward on it. But I live out in Sheepshead Bay, really close to Brighton Beach and Coney Island, and I had a huge life shift in 2019. I graduated from grad film school, and I felt like one part of my life was fading away, and I always wanted to capture what it felt like to live in that part of Brooklyn in your twenties, so I just started sketching these scenes, writing about people in the neighborhood. It started out as a vignette film, filmed on DV tape [with plans to] project them on different walls around the city. And it was just a love letter to South Brooklyn and New York in general.
Also in 2018, I met Kota, the lead in my film on the train and we had kept in touch for years, so I had been in touch with her even when I was still in school and she was always a part of those vignettes. I lived on this street called Kings Highway for a long time, a main street [where] there was always something going on outside my window, so a lot of those vignettes were based on that, and the first one was this girl who was pretty overwhelmed and had a baby, and I heard she was trying to get the baby quiet by singing Pop Smoke to it out of her window. That was one of the first images I got and we never got to do that [on screen], but I think that was probably the first sketch of Kota’s character.
So it came together in little pieces, and the Flies Collective, who had supported “Pillars” at Sundance, had said, “Hey, if you’re writing anything, we’d love to help you make whatever you want to make next.” It was after I went to a Sundance residency right before the lockdown, and when I came back from that, that’s when I hit up my friend Matt Petock, and I was like, “Hey, I’m sketching out this thing that I want to shoot on DV tape and short ends. Can you read it?” And that’s how we started.
Your work with Kota seems like it goes beyond a traditional collaboration when there’s all this ephemera from her life in it – old videos and such. What was it like working with her on this?
I call her my little sister — I would say bonus sister, but she’s just my official sister. Dakota pours in everything, all of herself, into a role and into anything she does and every time we got together to film a chapter, there was always this period of catching up and figuring out what she wanted to do and what she didn’t, but we’re constantly talking, texting, and sending voice notes to each other and she’s giving her emotional energy to what was in the script. There’s a lot of things that were inspired by our conversations. We always would talk about parents and what it means to be home and what real home means, and those were the conversations that were folded into the film. Some were just complete fiction — I wanted to explore a character that does the wrong thing sometimes and that was totally not Dakota. But when I first met her, she [only] told me later on that was [during] the first few months she was in New York, so she poured a lot of that experience into the film.
And I just never wanted anything to feel too overwhelming for her. We used her real name — she goes by Kota, but I call her Dakota [in the film], and I did that with the actors because I like to film things on the fly, so if they were doing something that was really interesting, I didn’t want them to have to suddenly switch into calling each other a fake name. But at the same time, you just have to be careful of giving your actors an out, because when things we filmed were emotionally heavy, I never want them to be too attached to that. But [Dakota’s] just an amazing artist and I can’t wait for people to see who she is. We always have conversations like, “Oh, you discovered her.” No, nobody discovered anybody. We just ran into each other at the right place at the right time.
It seems like it. And not only does she have a real presence on screen, but one of the most moving elements is how you give one to Nelson Sullivan, who chronicled his life in New York during the 1980s, much as you were doing now with Dakota. How did that parallel enter the film?
Once we decided not to make the film a vignette film and wholeheartedly dedicate it to Dakota, we filmed the first chapter in this vignette way, another whole thing with other characters and I think that could stand alone as a short, but we had to let that go. It was just so ambitious. But I always knew I was talking about old New York and the history of New York, and I didn’t want to lose that part, so I’d always wanted to do something with the Nelson Sullivan archive. I discovered Nelson on YouTube when I was still in Texas and mixed in that story, saying [Dakota] discovered him in high school [which is] how I discovered him, trying to figure out what East Village was in the ’80s. I was really interested in the club kids scene before I came to New York and learned about it through his archive, and when I started researching images for this film, I went back to his archive because there’s a lot of times he would go to Coney Island.
Halfway through, I was like, “Why not mix Nelson in? The people at his archive are just amazing and Nelson’s just such a part of the fabric of New York. When I was watching his films, I had the feeling like, he’s really impacting me and we’re totally two different people, living in two different places in time, so why is that? I got the feeling that he was my friend after I watched him for a good week and and what he did was extraordinary, but I don’t think he knew. He captured a very specific community and important moments in the history of New York, even though I’m sure at the time he wasn’t thinking that. But what he left behind was amazing and I’m always hoping that our movie honors that, because he is a really big deal to me.
You’ve hinted at it, but from what I understand you’ll give takes to the actors where they’re completely silent or left to their own devices to get a sense of how they engage with their surroundings or a situation unmediated. Does that take you in directions you might not expect but can get excited about once you see what you had in the edit?
Yeah, I always do silent takes and I always try to take my time, [though] being an indie film, you don’t always have it. We filmed this film over the long period of time — over two years and it was shot across seasons. And some things out of order and some things not, so it was a challenge, but we took the time and within that, I always learned, especially over the last year or so, just always take that extra 10 minutes to do something quiet and to rest in the silence. Oftentimes I love the time to just read where my performers are really trying to feel out their mood and try not to force anything that feels not right. That’s what I always tell Dakota. “Whatever feels right to you.” I just wanted it to feel good to her and if she wasn’t ready to do a particular scene, we just put it down. We’d push it in the schedule.
But a lot of things are always discovered in the edit. You always expect something to be super important [where] you’re like, “Oh my God, we really need this,” but in the edit, maybe you don’t. At the same time, maybe we still needed it because some of those scenes warmed up Dakota to another moment [that made it into the film]. Even if it’s on the cutting room floor, I feel like still filming those things that you think are important are still important because it gets you or your actors to another place that they need to arrive to for another scene. So it took a different shape in the editing room, but it just took a different shape as we went. It’s a completely different film than what it was from the beginning when we started.
What’s it like getting it to Sundance?
It’s insane, and everybody put 200 percent of who they were into this film, but it was such a surprise. It’s the nicest surprise I could ever get. We’re just all so excited, texting each other and going crazy. The emojis are just like hands up fire. We’re all extremely excited and I’m just very grateful and overwhelmed that we get this opportunity. When you’re a director and you set out to do something that’s ambitious, halfway down the line, you start feeling really guilty when it gets really hard, like so many people are putting their time into it. Look at what we’re doing. Is it going to work out? So I’m really happy that everybody’s going to get the opportunity to come together and really celebrate it in a real way.
“Tendaberry” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22nd at 3:15 pm at the Redstone Cinemas 7, January 25th at 3:30 pm at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City and January 26th at 5 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas 3 in Salt Lake City. It will also be available to stream from January 25th through 28th.