◍ I’m headed off to another screening in a few minutes so the last thing I’ll mention for now are the two documentaries I saw yesterday. The Penny Black was showing at the less fancy Slamdance Festival, which often features grittier fare than Sundance and shows it in places like a hotel conference room lined with folding chairs.
Set in Los Angeles, The Penny Black, tells an impossible-to-look-away-from story about a young man who agrees to watch his Russian neighbor’s million dollar stamp collection. Are these stamps somehow tied up in the Russian mafia? Are they stolen property? Why has the owner failed to come back for them?
It’s great material for an S-Town style podcast, and the filmmakers Joe Saunders and Alexander Greer deserve a lot of credit for showing up with cameras and starting to shoot the day after they heard someone at a party talk about the neighbor who gave them a stamp collection to hold.