Anne Hanavan

A teen girl’s experiences online and IRL blur together in this quietly inventive short by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew. Through an ingenious use of subtitles, Durand and Chew seamlessly toggle between the banalities of young life and the fizzy, yearning commentary running beneath those same experiences when shared online.

Bitch-Beauty is an experimental documentary paralleling the lives of Anne Hanavan, whose experiences as part of the underground scene in the East Village of the 1980s was contemporary with now-deceased actress Zoe Tamerlis Lund, the actor and screenwriter of Bad Lieutenant, who died of a heroin/cocaine overdose in 1999. Using Hanavan's films, performances, readings, and music as well as footage from Lund's work, Bitch-Beauty is an intense seven-minute time capsule of addiction, the perils of street prostitution, and subsequent renewal or revival through cathartic self-expression.

Hanavan filming herself naked, holding a crucifix and playing with herself.