harmony-korine

Harmony Korine (born January 4, 1973)

is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author.

He is best known for the screenplay Kids and for directing the movies Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. He has been a prominent figure in independent film, music and art throughout the past decade.
Korine was born to a Jewish family in Bolinas, California and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of documentary filmmaker Sol Korine. He spent his early years in Nashville, before moving to New York City to live with his grandmother. A solitary teenager, Korine frequented revival theaters, watching classic films by John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Alan Clarke. He studied Dramatic Writing at The Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for one semester before dropping out to pursue a career as a professional tapdancer. Korine was skating with friends in Washington Square Park when he caught the eye of photographer Larry Clark. Korine showed Clark a screenplay he had written about a teenager whose father takes him to a prostitute. Impressed, the photographer asked him to compose a script about his everyday life. Within three weeks, Korine wrote Kids, a film about 24 hours in the sex- and drug-filled lives of several Manhattan teenagers that has been touted as a realistic viewpoint of youth in New York City during the AIDS crisis. Clark had given Korine the direction to include in the plot of the screenplay a teenage AIDS experience.
Kids & Gummo (1995-1998)

Korine first gained notoriety in 1995, at the age of 22, for the film Kids, which examines the lives of several New York City teenagers who are coming of age in the era of AIDS. Kids garnered good reviews, but due to its NC-17/unrated rating, few of its intended audience actually saw the film upon its debut. However, it has since become a significant cult film. Among others, the film features Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson in their first movie roles.

Following his fame with Kids, Korine directed and co-produced Gummo (1997), a film based on life in Xenia, Ohio, a town devastated by a tornado on April 3, 1974. Forgoing conventional narrative, Gummo embodies sketches written by Korine, hence the nonlinear, fragmented events over the course of the film capitalizing on the obscure. Much of the cast was found during preproduction where it was filmed in Tennessee, and of all those who appeared in the film, only five were experienced actors/actresses. The film is notable for having unsettling, often bizarre scenes, as well as its dreamlike soundtrack, which strengthens the disconcerting atmosphere.

It premiered at the 24th Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 1997. During the screening, numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence. After the screening, Werner Herzog - the prolific director associated with the German New Wave - and Harmony Korine hosted a Q&A session in which Werner gave praise to the film overall, especially the bacon taped to the wall during the bathtub scene. Later he told the New York Times, “When I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair. [Korine's] a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position. It’s not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?”

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