Fiction

Heaven Knows What

Benny Safdie, Joshua Safdie
USA 2014
93 min
V'14

Joshua and Benny Safdie, the New York-based siblings known for their charmingly bittersweet independent features and shorts, have made their most accomplished and fearless film yet with this fierce fusion of fiction and documentary realism blending real actors with fugitives, drug dealers, and street legends as it chronicles a young addict feeding her addictions and finding mad love on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
Based on the experiences of Arielle Holmes – a homeless teenager with a ferocious Jersey accent – the film stars Holmes as Harley, a fictionalized version of herself: a heroin-hooked panhandler unable to get either the junk or her wicked boyfriend Ilya out of her system. Locked into the relentlessly repetitive cycle of the addict’s life – the never-ending search to score, the squabbles with dealers and fellow junkies, the violence ever ready to erupt as either farce or tragedy – she is still driven by a strange (and surely self-destructive) desire for beauty, the explosive moments of rapture that puncture the drabness of her existence. (André Picard)

Credits
  • Arielle Holmes - Harley
  • Caleb Landry Jones - Ilya
  • Necro - Skully
  • Eleonore Hendricks - Erica
  • Yuri Pleskun - Tommy
  • Ronald Bronstein
  • Sean Price Williams
  • Benny Safdie
  • Ronald Bronstein
  • Audrey Turner
  • «Mad Love in New York City» von Arielle Holmes
Elara Pictures, Iconoclast Films

Elara Pictures

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