Great French review of my film Barbazul (Bluebeard - Barbe Bleue)

You can read the review right here: Barbazul



Don't read French? Try viewing it with Google Translate:



English



Español

Olalla, "Self", Weng's Chop, and my first music video!

Family portrait 1880

Last Saturday we had a wrap party to close the production of Olalla. It was great. I couldn't drink because I was getting over the stomach flu, but, because everyone else was drinking, the joie de vivre spread to me as well. I danced until 3AM. My cat let me sleep in, until 10AM, so nice of him.

The day after, I realized how important it is to close a film with a party like that. To experience again the companionship of the cast and crew of the film, this time without the pressure of making the film. I finally felt like I could move on from the production, begin anew, with another film of course.

It must be said that I have a really great team. The affection and camaraderie we feel for each other really helps to lessen the stress of production. Also, the fact that everyone is so responsible, talented, and great at their jobs makes a huge difference as well.

The other thing I always have a hard time letting go of with a film, is my character. In learning acting so young, and I began with Lee Strasberg's techniques, later with Stanislavski, and more interpretations on Method acting, it seems I never learned how to separate my character from myself. This is not to say that I create a character who is anything like me. But I'll take select memories, feelings, experiences of mine and combine them to make my character. But then I become only those experiences, those feelings. Everything I feel for that time while we're in production is based only on that information. When we're done shooting, it can take me weeks sometimes to find myself again. Anything I accomplish as Amy Hesketh seems so far removed from me. It's painful, I lose my sense of self completely. Like my soul has left my body and been replaced by another's.

I really need to work on that if I want to continue acting.

Moving on to less angst-y topics...

Yesterday, I received a copy of the enormous book-sized Weng's Chop magazine #5, in which I am mentioned as participating in the PollyGrind Film Festival (an awesome experience you can read about here), and there's an AMAZING review of my film Barbazul (Bluebeard) by Tony Strauss. Here's an excerpt:

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Mario Bava, Jean Rollin and Jess Franco had somehow defied the laws of nature and biology and produced a lovechild who became a filmmaker? Yeah, me too! Well, now we have our answer in the form of writer/director Amy Hesketh."

Totally awesome, right?! (I'm a bit overwhelmed). He goes on about Barbazul:

Add caption

"...everything about this film has the look and feel of much of the 70's output of the aforementioned three filmmakers, from the direction to the editing to the music to the production design. This erotic reimagining of the Bluebeard legend is like a sexy little time machine that gloriously transports your spirt back to the Euro-Horror glory of days past."

You can get your own copy of Weng's Chop right here! There are pretty pictures of me in there, as well as a bible's worth of interesting articles about bizarre, cult, action, and exploitation films, in addition to an amazing coverage of the PollyGrind 2013 Film Festival. If you're a fan of strange cinema, you pretty much need this 265 page magazine anyway.

You can get your hands on a copy of Barbazul on our site right here on download, or DVD, or on Amazon.com on download, or DVD.

And... a week after coming back from shooting Olalla, I directed a music video for Andrea Figueroa, for her song Mas Que Palabras. Here's the video below, and you can listen to more of her music right here.



It was so nice working with Andrea. She was a bit self-conscious about appearing in lingerie for the video, but as she put it, "if I was going to take my clothes off for anyone, it had to be you (directing the video)". She said that I made her feel very comfortable during the shoot, which made me glad.

I'm very proud of what we accomplished in this video, with no budget whatsoever. I feel like Art rises to the surface with challenges like that.

There's so much going on lately, that I'll have to write another blog post to cover it all. Stay tuned!

Barbazul (Bluebeard 2012) Movie Review by S.E.

Checkout this review of my film Barbazul (Bluebeard)!



S E Lindberg: Barbazul (Bluebeard 2012) Movie Review by S.E.: Barbazul (Bluebeard);NR 7/10 Stars. Review by S.E. (on IMDB.com) Recommended for (1) mature audiences who (2)  enjoy literary, pac...

Obscure Video And DVD Blog: AMY HESKETH INTERVIEW.........

An interview with yours truly about my film Barbazul (Bluebeard)!



Obscure Video And DVD Blog: AMY HESKETH INTERVIEW.........: This is another interview I conducted with Amy Hesketh a while back about the movie BARBAZUL. It has taken a while to finally get this publi...

2013: The End of an Era (Catharsis, be my valentine)

So, you're wondering about the title? What I mean is the end of an era of emotional pain and suffering. In real life, not on screen. No worries.

Between 2010 and 2013 I had a lot of suck¹ happening in my life. Those three years were like a crash-course in hard knocks. What my mother calls, "An abrupt loss of innocence". I experienced a personal loss. I ended a long relationship. And my dad got sick, and suddenly I was entirely responsible for him.². In February of this year, my father died. Now I'm learning to live with my 50% chance of not going out like a zombie far before my time. Thanks, genetics. Hooray to living on the edge! Every day is a gift! Yay!

But there's good news: people heal, and they actually have a bottomless pit of innocence, and strength, left if they know how to look for it, deep inside. Artists need their innocence, believe me. It's there, I looked for it and found it. Pure magic.

Between those years a lot of great things also happened, namely that my output as a filmmaker has been exponential, or at least it feels that way. The production company, in which I'm a partner, is going strong and we're making new movies all the time. I'm actually able to make the films I want to, with little compromise. Seriously? Yes. This is the most awesome thing ever, short of actually having lots of money to produce those films.

He meows like a tiny dinosaur. I'm not kidding.

This year Dead But Dreaming had its theatrical run and pre-release, I had a great interview published in Fangoria Magazine, lots of interviews in other magazines and blogs, traveled from coast to coast, went to the PollyGrind Film Festival³ with Barbazul, met some great people, had good times with old friends, a fantastic time with a new friend, helped out my mom with lots of manual labor, shot about 2/3 of my fourth film as director, Olalla, ran a pretty successful IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for the other 1/3 of Olalla, and now have a distribution deal in the works for all of the films. And last, but not least, I found a very cute kitten in my garden, named Mitsou, after the Balthus drawings. When I only focus on the positive, it was a complete and utter blast.

Look at all the pretty awards!

On Saturday the 21st, I threw a party for much of the cast and crew of Olalla. We celebrated the Solstice (at least I did, having been raised by a pagan goddess (my mother)), and we found out at 6PM PST that we won a huge amount of lovely awards from The Beverly Hills Outlook!

Among them, I won Best Director (Gold) for Le Marquis de la Croix, Best Actress (Gold) for Dead But Dreaming, and Barbazul won Best Film (Gold). I really could not be more pleased! You can see all of them at this link right here.

It was wonderful to share that with the people who make everything happen, who believe in what we do, and put their hearts and souls into their work with us. I love them dearly.

I'm very excited to start 2014 with even more projects. We'll be shooting the 1880s sequence for Olalla, including the big scene, it looks like Jac Avila has an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's Justine in the works, Erix Antoine has a great script we'll be shooting (I finally get to kick ass in an action movie!), there's a good chance I might be heading into the jungle to shoot something (huge insects! pretty birds!), I have a script for a horror film, and I'm making a horror short in collaboration with some PollyGrinders.

This year is ending well.

This is fantastic!

---

1 For my non-English-speaking readers (who may be using Google Translate) "suck" = bad (mal)^↩

---

 

Nonsensical ledge, be gone!
I will take out my wrath upon thee.

2 100 painful pages of the ups and downs of that story could be put right here. It would read like a horror soap opera.

The past few days I've been really angry, and didn't know why. I gave it some thought, and realized that this time last year was the last time I saw my father alive. I think he recognized me, he smiled a lot. I felt guilty for not doing more. I still feel guilty, even though everyone tells me I did a great job with him. Someday, I wish to feel at peace about that.

I cried, I smashed a ledge off of a wall that didn't need to be there. I feel better now. And have about 5 inches more space in that room. ^↩

---

Barbazul in Las Vegas, baby!

3 I just realized that I'm a silly person for not writing about the PollyGrind Film Fest before now?! Chad Clinton Freeman has organized pure AWESOME there in LV! I went for the entire 5 days, watched tons of films, had my picture taken with Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Dyanne Thorne), was completely dazzled by the weirdness of Las Vegas (my 2nd visit), and most importantly, connected with a bunch of very cool people. It's what a film festival should be, well-organized, well-curated, lots of fun. I got to Q&A after the screening of Barbazul for a whopping 25 minutes, probably to the utter consternation of the kind director, Chad, who had another film scheduled after mine. I loved every minute of PollyGrind... except for that wicked hangover I had one day out of the five. But, I cured it by watching more films.^↩

That's yours truly with Dyanne Thorne and Howard Maurer of "Ilsa" fame. Pretty sweet.

An Inspired Review of Barbazul!

(Veronica) "portrays death throes with disturbingly believable authenticity"

Yesterday a very positive and insightful review was published in The Beverly Hills Outlook by editor Charles Lonberger. To say the least, it was well received by yours truly. The reviews says many complimentary things about the film and the acting of Veronica Paintoux, Mila, Joya, Jac Avila. Well, everyone in the cast. And this is what it says about me:

"The most interesting role, an otherwise minor part, of Jane, is assumed by director Hesketh, slyly referencing an inside joke by assigning the role to herself. It is a self-portrait of the Artist as masochist, handcuffed and whipped. In this role, as a fictional author of S&M novels, Hesketh wants to be hit “harder,” and ends up buried beneath, and thereby literally lower, than dirt. The assignment of this role to herself is transparent. Her interpretation of this very dark role is as girlish as it is disarmingly and deceptively casual. Most importantly, it voices the central dialectic of Hesketh's creative self: as filmmaker, she is very much in control, yet the fiction she imagines, as in a dream, celebrates control being forcibly taken from her, here in the form of her own death, which she eroticizes, due to the manner in which it is realized.

Extremely dark, ultimately introverted and intelligent entertainment, Barbazul is distributed by Vermeerworks."

You can read the whole review at this link right here!

Me, celebrating my loss of control.

Death, Maleficarum, Reviews, Olalla

As some of you may already know from my posts on Facebook, my father passed away not long ago. Although I was supposed to be prepared for it, I wasn't. So, I took an emergency trip up to the great white North, saw friends and family, and slogged through a bunch of bureaucratic paperwork. Why does death involve so much paperwork? Incredible.

Robert Louis Stevenson, my new BF

I'm back in the South now, where the water goes down the drain the other way, and am getting back to the project at hand, my next movie, Olalla, in the midst of mourning. My next movie involves death. And a strange family.

I was perusing the interwebs and found that someone had written a review about Maleficarum recently on horrornews.net. You can read it right here!

I also received some spectacular reviews of Le Marquis de la Croix and Barbazul from the Beverly Hills Outlook, which will be published this year. Here are a couple of excerpts below:

Le Marquis> "This intense and focused Bolivian production, handsomely mounted by Amy Hesketh and Jac Avila with just the right visual accents and splashes of color for Decadent Cinema, is a master class in film direction, courtesy of Hesketh herself."

Wow, "masterclass in film direction", thanks!

Barbazul> "This Latinization of Bluebeard is the most successful adaptation of that fairy tale to the cinema to date, as, in it, cineaste Amy Hesketh subtly expands her thematics from her already established central concern of Control (of one being over another) to Complicity."

Again, seriously, thanks!

A bit of Inspiration

Olalla also includes themes of Control and Complicity. I do seem to like those themes, don't I? I'm also including Incest, Genetics, Vampirism, the Victorian, and the Gothic. Just to round things out.

More Inspiration

Review of Barbazul by Dean Andersson on IMDB

What joy to wake up this morning and find a great review of Barbazul (Bluebeard) by the renowned horror writer Dean Andersson on IMDB!

Here's the link to the original or you can read it here below:

Amy Hesketh's BARBAZUL is an effective horror film of great style and insight that would give Hannibal Lecter the creeps!, 12 February 2013

Author: C Dean Andersson

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

One of the love scenes in Barbazul

Based upon the classic serial killer horror of Bluebeard, BARBAZUL presents a new and chillingly effective original version of the tale. Jac Avila skillfully plays Barbazul/Bluebeard with a charming sophistication that seduces innocent and worldly victims alike. As the advertising promo for the film says, he loves women, he just can't stop killing them. And some of those murders in the film are written, staged, and directed by Hesketh in such a way that they crawled under my horror movie radar and jumped me from the inside. I have seen so many scary movies, but the kind that play it easy, using gore and jump-out-at-you scenes, fade as soon as the film is through. Others, like the suspense classics of Hitchcock or the shadowy mood pieces produced by Val Lewton, slip up on you and instead of making you react by looking away, keep you watching, even when it begins to feel like you are intruding on something very private that you would really rather not see. But then it's too late. You saw. It's in your mind. And it keeps coming back to you at odd moments the next day, and afterward. It is obvious Hesketh impressed me, again.

Amy Hesketh's character getting the treatment in Barbazul

Each of her films thus far, Le Marquis de la Croix and Sirwiñakuy, have been a unique and strong example of how entertaining artistic films that break the mold and defy convention can be. Being a writer myself, of course I credit the way Hesketh creates the underlying story with how effective the work becomes. And her character in BARBAZUL is a writer whose demise is every writer's nightmare! "Come on, just give me another minute to finish this, I'm almost done, just a moment more, don't interrupt me right now, come back later, let me finish!" It is a diabolical scene for a writer to watch. But at least, all of us who have been interrupted while trying to write do not, hopefully, have happen to us what Hesketh has happen to her character! And then, of course, it gets worse.

Beto Lopez as the sinister butler, Walter

All of the actors turn in excellent performances. Jac Avila's stylish interpretation of Bluebeard was aristocratic and cultured even as the sociopath within him does cold-blooded Evil, reminding me of Vincent Price's best performances. Roberto Lopez's Walter is one of the creepiest butlers on film, sinister without being overt, very subtle and effective, one of those "there's something wrong here but nothing I can put my finger on so it's probably just my imagination, but--" kind of things...if there were an anti-Batman, this is the anti-Alfred,or even more, "Klove" in the second Christopher Lee Dracula film Hammer Films made, Dracula Prince of Darkness. Come tothink of it, this could almost have been Bluebeard Prince of Darkness!

The very long journey

Mila Joya as Soledad

The ride to get to Barbazul's plantation (castle) over the twisting, turning road (like the one leading to Castle Dracula) emphasizes how far from any kind of help the women he takes there are. And the countryside through which the road passed reminded me of the beautiful, vast emptiness of the high desert of Northern Arizona where I once lived. Mila Joya's innocent and noble character totally sells her growing unease and alarm as she becomes more and more aware that she has been trapped by a monster (like Jonathan Harker in Castle Dracula!--and it just occurred to me that Hesketh's Dracula, if she ever chooses to do one, might finally nail Stoker's classic better than anyone ever has...). Another "victim," convincingly portrayed by Veronica Paintoux as an aggressive and worldly counterpart to Joya's character's helpless innocence, makes you believe she can damn-well take care of herself, which makes it even worse, for her, when she suddenly discovers that, no, not really, she can't handle Barbazul, either.

Veronica Paintoux as Annabelle

Original music by Brad Cantor and La Negra Figueroa added just the right touch to the film, reminding me, somewhat, in the best way of a Goblin score for an Argento classic. Finally, "Superb" does not really do this film justice. "Eros and Thanatos" writ large might be a better description, "Sex and Death," "Beauty and Horror," like the face of the great Barbara Steele's "Muriel" at the end of NIGHTMARE CASTLE, or the visage of the Norse Goddess Hel, half beautiful and seductively alive, half dead and nightmarishly decayed. In BARBAZUL, you can't have one without the other, see? As if you'd want to, right? And one extra bonus--if you happen to have seen Richard Burton's portrayal of Bluebeard in that famous old film, Jac Avila will finally make Burton's face stop flashing into your mind at the mention of the name, "Bluebeard." So, in addition to this great new film, thank you, Amy and Jac, for that!

Jac Avila as Barbazul, effectively erasing Burton's face from your memory

1st Review of Barbazul

From http://www.searchmytrash.com/movies/barbazul(2012).shtml

Barbazul

Bolivia 2012
produced by
Amy Hesketh, Roberto Lopez L., Jac Avila for Pachamama Films, Decadent Cinema
directed by Amy Hesketh
starring Jac Avila, Veronica Paintoux, Mila Joya, Paola Terán, Erika Saavedra, Amy Hesketh, Mariela Salaverry, Roberto Lopez L., Erik Antoine
written by Amy Hesketh, loosely based on La Barbe Bleue by Charles Perrault, music by Brad Cantor, Andrea Figueroa (La Negra)

review by
Mike Haberfelner

Barbazul (Jac Avila) sits in on a photoshoot with young model Soledad (Mila Joya), and while the photographer (Erik Antoine) proves to be a perfect arsehole, Barbazul befriends the young woman, soon takes her on dates, proposes to her - and promises to take care of her student sister Ana's (Mariela Salaverry) tuition and stuff.
Soon, Soledad moves in with Barbazul in his remote wine plantation, and he gives her all the keys of his vast farmhouse, but warns her to never use the key to his study ... but of course, at the first opportunity - when he's gone to fetch Ana for a visit, actually - Soledad enters the study ... a rather uninteresting room actually, if it wasn't for Barbazul's diary, which Soledad soon starts to read ...
The diary starts with the story of Barbazul's first wife Annabelle (Veronica Paintoux), a still very pretty model at about the end of her career. Just like Soledad, Barbazul had met Annabelle at a photoshoot, befriended her, datedher, proposed to her, married her, and taken her to his plantation. However, she soon felt like a prisoner in his remote farmhouse and because of his refusal to take her anywhere, so she wanted to seperate ... and he strangled her.
Not too long after that, Barbazul met singer Maga (Paola Terán) at a concert. The two soon fell in love, and he took her to his farmhouse to keep her - but she didn't want to give up her music career, so he knifed and strangled her.
Art lover Agatha (Erika Saavedra) was just a bossy bitch who wanted to take over too much of Barbazul's life ... but she found it rather sexy of him to tie her to a bed in the nude - her bad judgement and her demise!
Erotic novelist Jane (Amy Hesketh) was really creative when it came to their sex life, and the handcuffs and whips were actually her idea ... and also her end.
Soledad has just finished reading the diary when Barbazul returns with Ana, as promised, and of course knowing all this she's scared shitless. And of course Barbazul finds out she has been to his study and read his diary, and ...

Based on a fairytale, this starts like a rather typical (if impressively shot) romance, and only the murder (of Amy Hesketh) at the beginning of the movie suggests there is something wrong - which of course creates just the right atmosphere of unease for the film to never lose its edge. Add to this a directorial effort that's subtle enough and lets the film flow at a fittingly moderate pace, but doesn't shy away from more extreme images when needed (like in most of Amy Hesketh's own scenes of the rather shocking finale), a uniformly very competent cast, and wonderful locations, and you've got yourself a pretty impressive film.
Recommended, actually!

Oh, and if my review at all got you interested, you may want to get the movie from here:http://movies.vermeerworks.com or http://vermeerworks.com/store/dvds/

review © by Mike Haberfelner