Movie Nite

Celebrating the lifelong debt I owe to movies for opening me up to ALL the possibilities, and helping me navigate the darkness in myself.

**Official selection of the Summer 2020 COVID-19 International Film Festival**

I took Lockdown as an opportunity to seriously think about my life path, where I had been, and what I thought was important. This short film is a reflection of my self-reflection. While it seemed like everybody was taking to social media to meme about Tiger King and Normal People, I kept feeling deeply drawn to the influential movies from my past. Some of it was definitely seeking comfort in the familiar, but as I started popping DVDs into the player, I realized it was also a dissection of myself.

Surprisingly, revisiting things I had felt connected to in childhood and adolescence, during a moment in history that felt so incredibly unstable, inspired all kinds of new insights. At the same time, I realized everything important I believed in then, I still believe in now. The aesthetics I embraced then, though they may seem clunky compared to our modern obsession with hyperrealism and spectacle, still very much move me today. I don’t consider myself a classicist or purist by any means, but these revelations were a creative catharsis. I took it as encouragement from the Universe to keep pursuing experimentation in melding the physical and digital worlds to achieve a truer expression of inner reality…

2D Animated Short Film “Movie Nite”

Written, Directed, Performed, Animated and Edited by MJ Kuppinger

Music by Detangler

A Mystical Cartoonism Thingie, made in 2020