Staff Pick Premiere: "Charlotte" by Zach Dorn |

This Week's Staff Pick Premiere, forgotten folk-singer Lena Black discovers her fifty-year-old track "Charlotte" is being reconstructed to become a popular pop tune. Set in the aftermath of the song's release, director Zach Dorn explores how the legacy of the song impacts Lena, her daughter Diane, and her 11-year-old grandson, Eli.

In her letter to the pop star, Lena writes: "There is something far worse than forgetting or to be confused." The central idea is embedded throughout the film as the newfound triumph reveals past injuries. In a series of all-but-one conversations , including Lena's letter Diane's telephone call, as well as Eli's tape recording Dorn draws a moving depiction of a family that begins to hear each other through the music.

When asked about his unique structure for the film, Dorn shared: "I loved the conceit of exploring these connections and not seeing the entire families interact. Through the use of individual monologues, I wanted the audience to be as if the characters were each creating their own version of the same song. There are generational physical, emotional and geographical gaps, but, hopefully some element at the root of their anxieties will eventually lead to the same melody."

It's a familiar tune to those who have experienced the separation of their families however "Charlotte" differs from other family drama that we've seen on the . With hand-crafted puppets and stop-motion animation, Dorn invites us to join in their lives, memories, and imaginations, for an incredibly moving journey.

 In advance of the release the release, we spoke to Dorn to find out more about his inspiration the process, style, and process. Check out the interview to learn more about "Charlotte."

 On the film's inspiration:

"In 2019, I created a puppet show about world's largest sponge and the popular TV program Gilmore Girls. While buying some mini-craft supplies in the fake flower aisle of a Michael's craft shop, Carly Rae's rendition of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" came on the loudspeaker. The cover is incredibly upbeat an excellent bubbly pop track, which is odd because Joni Mitchell's original track is difficult and empathetic. This was an amazing feeling as I loved this Carly Rae cover so much. For me, the popular version, despite being more artificial was still full of the emotions of Joni Mitchell's original. I felt jaded and dismayed by this idea, but was able to imagine Carly Rae jepsen as well as Joni Mitchell's renditions of "Both Sides Now" as they conversed. That conversation would eventually become the lyrics to "Charlotte ."

 In creating the script:

"I thought of the first rendition of "Charlotte" as an radio show, a sort of the Joe Frank voyeuristic drama, that was set in miniature worlds, without puppets. I composed the story from the viewpoints of eight characters that all were in a professional or personal relationship that was built around the tune "Charlotte." When spending time getting to know these characters, Diane and Eli considered to be the most fascinating, and so I kept them in the mix along with Lena and the pop star T.Y.M. After I had figured out this, I spent a lot of hours trying to find out how to make their stories intersect."

 On the music collaboration:

"When I was writing "Charlotte," I always had singer Jenna Caravello in mind. When I wrote the lyrics, I recorded her fictional Rolling Stone interviews featuring Lena Black and some of faux diary entries. With this data, Jenna wrote the folk song.

 Jenna's track was sent to Zhenya Golikova, who I met online. In the year 2020, Zhenya covered these voice memo tunes that I composed to a friend, silly and pathetic songs about cats and marshmallows as well as missing someone in another country, and the following year, Zhenya turned my tunes into a stunning ballad. Her work has this early Magnetic Fields vibe, like it was written by the sea by horny sea monkeys.. I sent her Jenna's song and she got the pop version one week after. ."

 on the talk-show program:

"So numerous female folk singers in the 60s and 70s were greatly under-appreciated. The likes of Vashti Bunyan Karen Dalton, Linda Perrhacs, And The Roches were ignored or relegated to categories such as "freak folk," and never taken with the same respect as male counterparts. I think there's this interesting paradox, in which folk music has been attributed to the ideals of progressivism, but are immersed in a specific sort of unspoken gender-based misogyny.

 In the mind of these musicians, I kept imagining Lena at this point of her career. to maintain relevancy her career would require participation in the 1970s Laurel Canyon lifestyle, party with the right kind of people and take the proper drug - all in a society created and run by males. And I just don't think she'd feel up to it. Perhaps it was because she was a mom, or maybe she saw Through It All. I'm not sure. However, I was influenced by her sorrow - which spanned the course of a lifetime, mourning for the loss of a profession. What happens to the anger of her? How does the grief play out for her daughter? When I was thinking about these issues, I tried to write Lena's interactions with Sam as the prologue for the relationship she has to her child."

 On developing his unique visual style:

 "In my 20s and early twenties I was a puppeteer, but I was never any good in the art. I am missing an eighth of my brain , and I'm sure it contributed to a real absence of spatial awareness. Building or manipulating anything that was three-dimensional wasn't out of the question. It was a good thing I was able to get involved in Toy Theater, a type of two-dimensional puppetry which was once very popular in late 19th century England. I started building tiny dioramas out of matte boards and acrylics such as pop-up books. I manipulated live-projecting digital cameras inside of them, while telling stories of my landlord or dead dog.

 I obsess over the details of everything, no matter the bar code of an Doritos bag or the design of an McDonald's Happy Meal box. Because of my missing brain, I can't cut straight lines or shape things in a realistic way. So, I have this style that is a mix-up of the disintegration of things and obsessive.

 To create the puppets, I collaborated with stop-motion animators Oliver Levine and Lily Windsor to create a slightly gritty and textural style that was appropriate to the film's hand-painted universe. Since I made the film in the time of the lockdown, we had to work on a long-distance basis, Lily from Chicago, shipping tiny boxes of llamas, as well as Oliver leaving head sculpts at my front door Burbank ."

 On what's next:

 "Currently I'm independently developing a documentary on Livia Soprano, the CGI Livia Soprano from the third season of The Sopranos, as well as the genetic mutation known as BRCA2. I was raised in an Italian American family filled with various eccentricities and personalities, but at the end of my 20s the BRCA2 affected the family connections through the premature deaths of members of the family.

 In the year 2020, I watched The Sopranos for the first time. Each show felt as if I was suddenly in the conversation of my family. Now, I am making an film on this event that recreates home movies in stop-motion , and then analyze Livia Soprano's performance posthumously in relation to my personal memories of grief ."