A Short Film About the Long Career of Abel Ferrara

A Short Film About the Long Career of Abel Ferrara (2004)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This forty-seven minute documentary takes a look at the career of Abel Ferrara and features interviews with a variety of people who have worked with him. Some of the people interviewed includes: Joe Delia, Brad Stevens, John Michael Sudol, Charles Lagola, Lisa Krueger, Jay Julien and Janice Ginsberg.

If you're a fan of Ferrara then you'll certainly want to check this out even though the end results aren't nearly as good as one would have hoped. The documentary was cheaply produced and we don't get clips from any of the films in question. What's worse is that not all of the films are discussed as we're basically given some stories about the more popular ones as well as name dropping stories about Madonna on DANGEROUS GAME.

One wishes that the documentary had covered all of the films or at least told more on the films that were discussed. There's nothing horrible here and as I said this is slightly entertaining but it just needed to do a bit more.

About 10 people from the pack Ferrara used to work with, are interviewed. They run down and comment on the director's complete (almost) filmography. As a visually attractive documentary, the film falls short. It's not a fancy, well-photographed piece of documentary. But with its 47 minutes running time, you get plenty of information, insightful anecdotes and fun trivia out of it. So it's a worthwhile watch for anyone interested in the works of this controversial New York-based director. This documentary was featured on the 2-disc special edition of Ferrara's 'King of New York', released on DVD in 2004. To my knowledge it has not received any other DVD release yet.