A young woman flees Kentucky to the last Babylon, New York City, where she is befriended by James Steele, a benevolent fiend who names her Bella and introduces her to the other side of life as a dominatrix in a religious brothel run by La Bruja.
The life and work of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat have been marked by a long quest for identity, by his Haitian and Puerto Rican family origins and by a founding trip to Africa. To portray this major painter of the 20th century, who died in 1988 at only 27 years old, is also to evoke the place of black American artists in the conservative and racist America of the Reagan years.
A teenager recounts a terrible night in the city where he ends up drunk and unhappy at a 24 hour diner. There, he has an encounter with a sweet, inviting family that leaves him feeling a little less lonely.
Directed by Claire Pei and acted by Pei and Michael Lally in New York, You Give Me an Orange, I Give You a Pie is a short film about a pair of lovers on a New York West City road that has been abandoned. Their relationship is erratic. The short film was filmed with a Bolex 16 mm camera.
