A Man Imagined

Screening after: Myself When I Am Real

Programmers notes: Canadian filmmakers Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy have built a rigorous, distinctive body of work that follows its own path between the borders of documentary and narrative forms. The duo is perhaps best-known to Baltimoreans for their back-to-back features The Patron Saints (2011), a stunning documentary set in a home for the elderly and disabled, and Francine (2012), a dissonant neo-realist character study starring Melissa Leo, both of which I championed during my time at Maryland Film Festival. While these films viscerally confront painful aspects of the human experience, they also found space for strange humor and glimpses of beauty. These seemingly contradictory fascinations with human misery and transcendent beauty come even more to the fore in A Man Imagined, a hybrid doc made in collaboration with its subject Lloyd, a man living off the grid and largely on the streets. Shot over the course of more than 2 years starting parallel to the the initial COVID-19 lockdown, A Man Imagined is the story of a person for whom living with minimal contact has become second nature—and one who, for all the pain and hardship around him, can still sometimes escape into the limitless alternate worlds a human imagination can conjure.

We’ve paired this excellent hybrid feature with Angeline Gragasin’s documentary-style narrative short Myself When I Am Real. Set in a Filipino-American Christmas party in the year 2000 and shot on period DV, it’s another film that alternates between painful circumstances and bursts of profound beauty.

— Eric Allen Hatch