The UNM Cinematic Arts Department presents an afternoon screening of They Had it Coming, followed by a Q&A with the director, Jon Jost, on Friday, Feb. 16 at 3 p.m. in CERIA Room 337.
Albuquerque is one of the last screenings Jost will participate in before his USA tour heads back to Europe. Set in Stanberry, Mo., population 1085, this film is a “story” about storytelling. Blake Eckard, who has lived all his life there, tells true stories from his county and town, in an imaginary local bar. Around this is woven a fictional “story,” which finds Blake eating dirt at the end. This work is a kind of rural tone-poem, pure Americana.
Jost is a self-taught filmmaker that has 50 years of filmmaking experience and has focused on a wide range of American issues in his films. The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, screened a complete retrospective of his work in 1991, which was repeated at a number of other prestigious Film Archives around the States.
He has won numerous awards, including the Caligari Film Prize at the Berlin Festival (1991), the Los Angeles Critics award for Best Independent Film (1992), the IFD/West’s first “John Casavettes Lifetime Achievement Award,” for independent filmmaking (1991) and the “Maverick Spirit Award,” at the San Jose based independent Maverick Festival (1991).
Jost's work has been shown at major film festivals around the world including Rotterdam, Berlin, Toronto, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Yamagata, Jeonju and Singapore.