BIOGRAPHY: Ryan Sullivan was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1985 and began studying film during high school after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo for the first time. In school his friends used to call him Charlie Starkweather, because he shot everything with his camera. In 2008, he received a grant from the Experimental Video Art Project in Omaha to fund his first film, which was lost when the lab accidentally destroyed his only print. After this setback, he left his small-town life for San Francisco and began documenting the lives of pornographers he met, the footage of which eventually became the basis for his documentary Island.
– RYAN SULLIVAN’S ISLAND (Documentary) –
Description: In 2008, 24 year old Ryan Sullivan set out from his Nebraska hometown with Hollywood aspirations. Instead he found himself in San Francisco, “the cool gray city of love,” making a documentary about a porn company. Paul Morris presents Ryan Sullivan’s acclaimed and shocking exposé of Treasure Island Media, ISLAND.
“This is no ordinary documentary. Ryan Sullivan tells a deeply personal story, dragging us from his hometown to San Francisco [on a] kind of existential quest. [Island] explores the shattered relationship between two brothers while penetrating the world of a wildly controversial underground porn studio.”
-Voisin, Tadah Blog
“Usually, documentaries about porn either turn into porn or miss the obscenity of porn entirely. One exceptionally gifted film maker manages to reconcile the two by invoking a superior beauty, a superior mystery. [Ryan Sullivan] has filmed scenes of gay porn as if he were the next Pasolini or David Lynch.”
-Richard Mèmeteau, Cultural Critic and Professor of Philosophy
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