Georg Csarmann
With his long-short doc, Jay, director Nickolas Duarte (Sea Change) tells the story of artist Jay Kyle Petersen, an abstract painter who specializes in “soul paintings.” What ostensibly starts out as a standard portrait doc about an unconventional painter quickly turns into something much more sensationalist—a deep dive into a person with a tortured past.
We initially learn about Jay’s approach to his process: people come to him to commission paintings of their soul or guardian angel, which the artist channels through the energy of a higher dimension, once he has gotten permission from his customers — or their pets. In that case, Jay claims to communicate with the animals, either living or deceased, telepathically. He describes himself as a vessel, leaning on supernatural powers to guide him in his art.
After this introduction, Jay opens the door to his past, figuratively and literally. He talks about how he was born intersex and shows us a picture of himself as a young woman. Growing up intersex in rural America in the 1950s and 60s, at a time when there wasn’t even a word for it, left its marks and emotional scars. But that is only the beginning: the more we learn about Jay, the more unusual his story becomes…
There are many ways in which Jay could have failed as a film if the story hadn’t been in the right hands. For one, the artist portrait doc is one the most wearisome tropes in the short film world. As Ivan Kander describes them in our article 15 Things Wrong With Your Short Film: “You know the type: lots of ambient music, voiceover, and pretty b-roll about some artist with a quirky or odd hobby.“ Fortunately, Jay circumvents these perils by telling the kind of story you’ve never heard before, looking way beneath the surface with every revelation uncovered during the 22-minute running time. As director Nickolas Duarte explains the process:
“I initially set out to make a short documentary detailing Jay’s painting process. His art is centered on painting various forms of soul energy. At the time, it didn’t really align with my personal beliefs so I thought it would be an interesting thing to try to capture and explore. Once we began the interview portion though, I realized there was so MUCH more to his story.“
If Duarte had only focused on the paintings, even though they are peculiar in their own right, you probably wouldn’t read about the film on our site right now. But thanks to Duarte’s instincts as a filmmaker, he chose to follow the story and give Jay the room and compassion he needed in order to open up.
Duarte continues:
“We did about 6 hours of intense and emotionally draining interviews which then served as the foundation for the film. The most difficult element though was trying to determine how we would visually tell his story. Ultimately, a unique approach to reenactments that found Jay witnessing his life unfold was the idea we settled on.”
Reenactments are often hard to pull off. If not done artfully, they have the scent of run-of-the-mill TV docudramas and true crime shows. But as with everything else mentioned above, Jay finds an interesting way to make the reenactments an essential part of the storytelling itself instead of just a narrative crutch. The way Duarte and his DoP, Will Turner, shot these sequences aligns with the general mystery around the painter’s recollections versus distorted or fabricated memories Jay’s mind has come up with to deal with everything that he has experienced.
Through the hybridization of documentary and staged scenes as well as its ambiguous nature, the film becomes a larger exploration of our perception of reality and how it is informed by our past: a past built on memories, which are incomplete and vague at best. As much as the filmmakers help Jay confront his experiences through reenactments with his present, older self, his memories are informed by narrative structures to make sense of what he has gone through. Although Jay’s life is an exceptional example, we all constantly tell ourselves stories about who we are, how we perceive the world around us, and how our memories of the past shape our sense of self—and vice versa.