Institute History
Description
A strange singer with God-given talent drifts through his adopted city of Memphis with its canopy of ancient oak trees, streets of shattered windows, and aura of burning spirituality. Surrounded by beautiful women, legendary musicians, a stone-cold hustler, a righteous preacher, and a wolf pack of kids, the sweet, yet unstable, performer avoids the recording studio, driven by his own form of self-discovery. His journey quickly drags him from love and happiness right to the edge of another dimension.
Writer/director Tim Sutton crafts an impressionistic folktale framed around the enigmatic musician/poet Willis Earl Beal and the city of Memphis. Adding a new legend to the city’s rich history, Memphis is an elusive document of myth-making and the sources that feed those myths. Similar to his first feature, Pavilion, Sutton blurs the lines between fiction and reality, taking the audience to a wholly contemporary dreamlike world, bolstered by Chris Dapkins’s sublime camera and a driving blues soundtrack by Beal.