Artists Who Inspire
Jonathan and Elan Bogarin
More than one hundred years have passed since my grandparents stepped onto Ellis Island. For immigrants living in New York City at the turn of the century, it was either the best of times or the worst of times. For my grandparents, life simply didn’t work out as well as it did for their siblings and the other relatives. By 1950, grandma rarely agreed to pose for pictures. “Who cares?” she’d say, “There’s nothing worth seeing here.” Unfortunately, that point of view was embraced by my mother whose crafty avoidance of the lens became somewhat of an art form. “Please put the camera away!” So I grew up with little evidence of the casual moments and family gatherings, the awkward candids capturing the ordinariness of my youth. In the absence of these snapshots, it’s challenging to recall, nourish and share my lifetime with a generation who never met my mother or my grandparents.
Perhaps that’s why I found 306 Hollywood so very, very special. It’s a sensory tour de force of love— a living, breathing creative tribute to a multi-generational relationship.
I’ve watched the film at least a half dozen times now and can’t stop recommending it to friends. According to co-creator Jonathan Bogarin, this film introduces a new language. “We wanted to create a language that felt rich, immersive, mixed sadness and happiness, past with the present…we wanted people to feel what we felt.”
“I hope I’m remembered with such tenderness, what a gorgeous legacy.”
The first thing I noticed in my conversation with this brother-sister team was how seamlessly comments flowed between them. It was like a baton silently slipping from one runner’s hand into the other’s.
They never set out to make this film. After their grandmother passed, they took on the task of cleaning out her effects. It was an 11 month journey that reframed the ordinary everydayness into something extraordinary. As Jonathan said, “Being filmmakers, we wanted to challenge what it means to document reality. We wanted to add a whole other range of creativity in terms of what reality could be. Everyone is going to have different types of remembering. For some it’s about the stuff, but for others, it’s about accessing the memories in any way you can.” Elan continued with, “Death makes you relearn the world in a way that is incomprehensible. It changes your life… you can’t go backwards. This in-between space is an opening to see things differently, feel things in a very unique way… somewhat magically, somewhat mystically, somewhat more surreal. Being in an emotionally raw space allowed us to process what we were experiencing.“
“Tell the story you want to tell”
Jonathan added, “Going through grandma’s stuff wasn’t really a death purging as much as it was a death reconnecting. We found meaning in her things, it brought to life our memories and experiences. She was absolutely there with us through the entire process, so we chose to see this reality as magical.”
As an award-winning film, 306 Hollywood established new genre and a niche for the creators. They call it a ‘magical realist documentary’. Elan believes inserting imagination into their literary non-fiction story allowed them to extract the delicious part of her life.
I couldn’t agree more. Transforming the mundane into something beautiful and aspirational is what artists do, and what Bevival is all about.
For sure, Jonathan and Elan have created a narrative blueprint for anyone considering immortality. Bravo! You can find their film on Prime and iTunes. -CM