An experimental art short, RETURN OF ALICE drops the viewer inside the mind of an artist as she journeys back to herself after a health crisis by regenerating her brain connections using her art and memories of the love, friendship, and adventures she shared with Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1980s NYC.
We're told to let the past go and to live in the present. But what if you are struggling to remember words, are unable to write a cohesive sentence, or remember how to drive the well-worn streets of your city? Sometimes, our connection to our past, the imprinting of long ago love and creativity, actually becomes the key to opening up the vault of who you are. I used memories, ephemera, music, and a trip back to NYC to paint my return to my life. Beginning in the aftermath of a health crisis apparent only via the opening brain visuals, I use my escape from Madison, Wisconsin as a teen to 1980s New York City as my circuitous pathway back to claiming myself as an artist three decades later. Reconnecting the effected parts of my brain via morsels of memory, music, people, and art, I finally fulfill the dictates of the first person to insist that I was an artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. In re-tracing the footsteps of some of our adventures together in the city, I find my way to becoming a version of myself I hadn't previously allowed my mind to fathom.
Charise M. Studesville is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and mixed media artist who uses truth to illuminate darkness within the human experience. She has a life-long obsession with secrets, and loves the discovery process of untangling them and finding the universal truths hidden within. She believes it’s how we discover the common bonds that build cosmic connection.
Charise has recently been delving into stories of women that center what she calls the midlife second puberty, where we have the opportunity to apply the life lessons and discoveries that are the rewards for our growing pains. All of this is integral to her current art, including such projects as: REASONS TO LIVE, a “mixed media memoir” and film project that revisit her adventures through the zeitgeist of the cultural and social scene of 1980s New York City; THE WAVES, a feature film about what happens to the friends left behind when ALS moves their mutual bestie to choose an assisted suicide exit and leaves one last wish for them to honor; and THE COMPOUND, a film that illuminates a non-traditional love story amongst unlikely friends who discover their happily-ever-after in their self-made homestead community.
Charise has films, tv, and book projects in the hopper, and is always excited to take on new projects that elevate her storytelling journey. As a fierce advocate for women, she is a proud member of WIF, Film Fatales, Women In Media, and Alliance of Women Directors, and is the founder of Hollywood Chick Mafia, a community of creative rebel chicks supporting each others' badassery.
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL
