Films
Light in the dark
Spring Equinox
unreleased
An ever-changing passion project that has evolved and refined over many years, Spring Equinox is a featurette about someone who goes on a walk around his neighborhood. Over the course of one day in late spring, he passes by a few people and wonders what they’re doing today and what they’ve done. His thoughts always return to someone unseen, unnamed.
83 minutes \\\ 1.33 : 1 \\\ Color
Such a simple frame story mirrors what was in fact a slow and complicated production. Upon its completion in April 2025, the film will have been seven years in the making. The long, winding path taken by its creator running parallel to the rambling promenade of his protagonist, played by himself. Each tweak to the story lead to a dramatic change in style, and each new innovation in post-production explores greater depth to the story.
As a consequence to the filmmaker’s curiosity and growth, the plot has changed greatly since its original conception, perhaps even vanished. Midway through post-production, an unusual choice was made to forgo dialogue. Babbling brooks and birdsong seemed to articulate the characters’ feelings better than the script could. It’s a quiet film about empty spaces, unspoken looks, and foliage.
The main source of spoken word comes in the form of an internal monologue, a stream of consciousness pouring out from the strolling protagonist’s consciousness and into a small notebook in his back pocket. Ultimately words fail him too, scrawling page after page of futile sentences just to avoid using one particular word.
Black Bile
2018
24 minutes \\\ 1.85 : 1 \\\ ColorLike the antiquated medical theory from which it takes its title, Black Bile was a rudimentary attempt at transmuting an invisible sickness into a tangible substance to be purged through means that are primitive, severe, and visceral.
Archy, a mentally ill adolescent, experiences several episodes over the course of seven episodes, each one exhibiting a drastic shift in tone and style to match his changing moods. The film’s formal polarity mirrors the protagonist’s state of mind as he oscillates from obsessively manic to profoundly despondent.
In the hyper-subjective nightmare world of the film—which seems to exist entirely within the confines of a childhood home—it is the world, not Archy, that is disordered. Prisoner to its disorganized logic, victim to its punishing absurdities, he trusts only himself to make any sense.
His solipsistic worldview dovetails with the creation of the film itself, which was made entirely by one person. James Kolakowski, who stars as Archy (and the two supporting characters), also wrote and directed the film, as well as doing the cinematography, editing, sound design, and score. He relies on every available formal techniques to visualize the dramatic methods by which the mentally anguished attempt to reveal the invisible sickness. Some passages are characterized by their catatonic inertia, others by a lacerating emotional invasiveness, and others by an incessant laughter at their own misery.
Inspiration for the film was drawn from many creative sources, the majority of which exist outside the cinematic medium. The paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat were essential to Black Bile’s charged visual compositions and psychotic editing, while the music of Daniel Johnston served as the blueprint to a deliberately amateurish soundtrack and fearlessly confessional monologue. The structure and psychological content of the story itself owe a great deal to Dante’s Inferno and Carl Jung’s Red Book, respectively.
Though critical to its creation, the film’s inspirations were refracted through the filmmaker’s unique vision, often warped beyond recognition when not explicitly referenced. The originality of the film owes itself to how profoundly personal it is, its willingness to distort reality in order to tell an undistorted truth, and how willing the filmmaker was to breach his own privacy and express as plainly as possible an inexpressible pain.
Comprehensive Writer-Director Filmography
2025
[forthcoming]2024
3 minutes
2023
3 minutes
[incomplete]souplifting
[scene]3 minutes
[scene]3 minutes
2021
6 minutes
E&J Spring-Summer Adventures (pts. 1 - 18)
2020
34 minutes
Marcy’s Book
2019
[incomplete][sequence]2 minutes
Refusing the Call
[scene]2 minutes
2018
9 minutes
24 minutes
6 minutes
2017
4 minutes
10 minutes
12 minutes
3 minutes
2 minutes
El Paso Shuffle-Around
12 minutes
High Five
4 minutes
Bouncin’ Off the Walls!
4 minutes
Locked Out
7 minutes
Dr. Finch
2016
20 minutes
A Very Bad Day
8 minutes
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