A film by Lynne Sachs
with poetry by Paolo Javier

A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier's Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.

Performers: Emmy Catedral, ray ferriera, Paolo Javier, Jeff Preiss, Inney Prakash, and Juliana Sass

Director: Lynne Sachs
Poems: Paolo Javier
Cinematographer: Sean Hanley
Sound Recordist: Mark Maloof
Editor: Rebecca Shapass
Sound Mixer: Kevin T. Allen
Productions Assistants: Priyanka Das, Conor Williams

Selected Screenings:
BAMCinemafest, Brooklyn Academy of Music; Museum of the Moving Image "Queens on Screen"; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Woodstock Film Festival; Camden International Film Festival

Selected Press:
"SWERVE is shot in Elmhurst, Queens, a richly diverse immigrant space that saw its residents endure our country's ground zero phase of Covid-19. SWERVE brings tremendous visibility to an Asian food court and workers otherwise invisible and ignored by the city. Some of the film's performers have lifelong ties to the nabe. Together we all honor the resiliency of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, underscoring the vitality of poetry and cinema in these fraught times" -- interview with poet Paolo Javier in QNS/ Queens News Service by Tammy Scileppi, https://qns.com/2022/06/swerve-nyc-performers-new-film-shot-in-elmhurst/

"SWERVE is a cinematic meditation on postmodern/avant-garde/post-colonial poetry construction in general and specifically it's a terrific incitement to read Javier's book and seek out more of Sachs's fascinating body of work" -- Herbert Gambill, Mystery Catalogue, https://mysterycatalog.com/2022/06/new-lynne-sachs-short-swerve-debuts-at-bamcinemafest/

"Sachs and Javier make a meal out of zipping around table to table where a pandemic may have kept some customers away, but as people begin feeling their way back into the world, the sensations of reconnecting are conveyed in phrases that may come across as nonsequiturs individually but coalesce into something greater as the feeling behind intonations and delivery transcend the statements themselves." -- Stephen Saito, Moveable Fest, https://moveablefest.com/lynne-sachs-paolo-javier-swerve/