Lou Reed has premiered a documentary he has made about his 102 year old cousin at the Vienna Film Festival. Entitled Red Shirley, the film entails Reed interviewing Shirley Novack about her life, including fleeing from the Nazis in Poland in 1938 to Monteal, then leaving Canada to work as a seamstress in New York. It took Reed 50 years since entering Syracuse University in Upstate New York to study journalism and film directing to make his debut as a film maker.
He says of the 28 minute documentary’s subject: “She has been living in the same apartment for 46 years, which is about 18 blocks away from where I live. She is in a book about garment workers and the people who fought for the union. At the start of the movie the way she is speaking is almost like poetry: we suffered for this, we suffered for that, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, that is a 100-year-old saying that and she deserves a statue, and then if not a statue, a movie’.” The sound track was provided by Reed’s Metal Machine Music trio.
Check out the trailer here
