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A Terrorist, an Ex-Gay and a Thief--Oh My!

Jessica Yu, Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker and creator of the beautiful and slightly creepy movie, In the Realms of the Unreal has a new film called Protagonist. The official site for the film states,
On one level, "Protagonist" intercuts the first-person narratives of four men who seem to have nothing in common except their charisma: a former German terrorist, a student of martial arts, a "formerly gay" evangelist and a serial bank robber. But this is only the beginning.

For Yu, who looks on editing as "weaving straw into gold," intercuts these stories not only with each other but with several different kinds of material. She has wooden rod puppets constructed by Janie Geiser doing brief scenes from the plays of Euripides, recited in ancient Greek. She has the same puppets performing scenes from the lives of these four men. And she has a dozen or so 15-second animated moments that go with single thematic words like "provocation," "certainty" and "doubt" that function as "little bits of breathing room."
The film did well at the Sundance Film Festival, got picked up for distribution and will be released in select theaters on November 30th.

From the trailer we learn about four men featured including Mark Pierport, a former ex-gay minister. I've never heard of Pierport before, but it seems we have yet another former ex-gay man coming forward to tell his story. And with Jessica Yu behind the camera, I imagine the film will present an insightful and artfully rendered presentation.

You can view the trailer for Protagonist here and you can see a interview with Yu and more clips from the film here.
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