Listen to my conversation with Glenn Holsten here!
HOLLYWOOD BEAUTY SALON
Directed by: Glenn Holsten (The barefoot artist, oc87)
Opens IN NEW YORK on Friday, July 29 at the Village East Cinema
WINNER! 2016 SAMSHA Voice Award (Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)
ABOUT THE FILM
Hollywood Beauty Salon portrays life at an intimate beauty parlor inside of the NHS Germantown Recovery Community, a non-profit mental health program in Philadelphia, where staff and clients alike are in the process of recovery. By gathering together to get their hair done, share stories, and support one another, they find a way to rebuild their lives. The documentary — which was work-shopped at the Salon over the course of four years — is also part of the recovery process, and the subjects of the film played an active part in shaping their own narratives and determining their unique individual styles.
ABOUT GLENN HOLSTEN
Glenn is an award-winning director of documentary films.
The Barefoot Artist, about global artist Lily Yeh, was filmed on four continents and had its theatrical premiere in New York and Los Angeles in December, 2014 and is currently available on Netflix. His most recent national broadcast on PBS, The Barnes Collection, follows Dr. Albert Barnes’ remarkable rise from Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhood to the top of the modern art world. SEE, a film that he created in collaboration with painters Bo Bartlett and Betsy Eby premiered at the Camden Film Festival in 2013.
He directed an eight-part series titled Women In Chemistry, about pioneering women chemists for the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Women In Chemistry appeared on public television as a one-hour television special, as will Scientists You Must Know, a documentary about the people behind the discoveries that changed our world.
Other long-form documentary directing credits include OC87: The Obsessive-Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger’s Movie, (theatrical release, 2012, Netflix); Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, (OVATION, 2010); Saint of 9/11, about Father Mychal Judge, the beloved chaplain to the NYC Fire Dept. (Tribeca Film Festival, IFC theatrical release, 2006, Netflix); Gay Pioneers (PBS, 2005); JIM IN BOLD, which harnesses the power of young voices to reveal the challenges and triumphs of being young and gay in America; Thomas Eakins: Scenes from Modern Life (PBS, 2001), a lyrical examination of America through the eyes of the 19th century painter; and HOUSE, a 30-minute film about The Korman Residence in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania that was famed Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn’s final residential commission.
He was commissioned by both The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts to create a series of moving portraits about artists and their work processes. Glenn is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. He has been awarded silver and gold awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for innovative television production. He has been honored with sixteen Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards. A collection of his work was exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 20th Century Video Gallery.
Glenn has directed films in China, Portugal, Kenya, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Poland, Bosnia and the Republic of Georgia. In 2000, he traveled to Mongolia, where he conducted a workshop for television professionals that explored creative methods for storytelling on television.
Glenn graduated from The University of Pennsylvania in 1984 with a B.A. in English.
GLENN'S APPROACH
Director Glenn Holsten conducted a 16-week workshop series at the Hollywood Beauty Salon, which created the foundation for the documentary script. Holsten and a film crew collaborated with the women and men who patronize and/or volunteer at the salon to develop individual stories centered around their special Hollywood Beauty experience. Participants discussed the depths of their illnesses and their paths to recovery. They tapped into joyful and painful memories alike — and explored their hopes and dreams for the future.
The final script that emerged from this workshop process is a new kind of documentary — a hybrid that artfully combines real life “vérité” (fly on the wall) sequences of everyday life activity in the beauty parlor with highly crafted filmic sequences employing animation, fantasy, and dramatic reenactment. The film’s subjects decided how their personal histories should be documented and shared; each designed the storytelling approach of his/her section of the film.
The "Hollywood Beauty Salon" is an intimate beauty parlor that happens to be part of the NHS Germantown Recovery Community, a non-profit mental health program in Philadelphia that is administered by NHS Human Services. Rachel "Hollywood" Carr Timms runs the beauty parlor, where staff and clients alike are all in the process of recovery from some form of mental health issue. By gathering together to get their hair done, share stories, and support one another, they find a way to rebuild their lives. The film is built around preparations for their annual "Hair Recovery Show"--their version of a beauty pageant--and it is this exciting undertaking that allows us to meet the characters and hear their stories. The documentary itself—which was workshopped at the Salon over the course of four years—actually ends up being part of the recovery process itself, and the subjects of the film played an active part in shaping their own narratives and determining the unique, individual style of their respective story arcs.
Deeply emotional and highly imaginative, (using animation and other expressionistic effects to convey the interior lives of its subjects), the film was directed by Glenn Holsten, an award-winning Philadelphia-based documentarian whose previous films include OC87: The Obsessive-Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger’s Movie, a feature-length documentary about recovery from the depths of mental illness through filmmaking, Saint of 9/11, a biography of Father Mychal Judge, the Chaplain to the New York City Fire Department who died on 9/11 which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and most recently, The Barefoot Artist, a portrait of artist Lily Yeh which was released last year.
Not rated, Runtime 88 minutes (In English/ Documentary/ USA)
TRAILER:
http://hollywoodbeautysalonmovie.com/
