The Life of Sean DeLear

A blazingly colourful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles' underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear (1964-2017) suddenly emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979. I Could Not Believe It joyously chronicles the experiences of a young Black, queer creative finding their identity, voice and style decades before Barry Jenkins' (rather more downbeat) Moonlight.

The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.

There the former frontperson of Silver Lake postpunk-combo Glue reinvented themselves as a cabaret performer and collaborated with famed art-collective Gelitin before passing away aged just 52. "SeanDe" entrusted their treasure-trove audiovisual archive to Zizenbacher, who with co-editor Sebastian Schreiner has crafted an eclectic collage generously spiced with effervescent extracts from DeLear's own extensive video-diaries.

These jagged hand-held snapshots bring back to often-hilarious life the electric days (and especially nights) from a quarter of a century ago, placed in retrospective context by present-day testimony from the survivors who knew SeanDe best and loved them the most. Sean DeLear — as in "chandelier" — lit up their world; Markus Zizenbacher now illuminates Sean DeLear for ours. (Neil Young)

Trailer
Orig. Title
The Life of Sean DeLear
Year
2024
Country
Austria
Duration
82 min
Category
Documentary
Orig. Language
English, German
Subtitles
English
Credits
Director
Markus Zizenbacher
Cinematography
Markus Zizenbacher, Aleksey Lapin
Music
Mike Watt
Sound
Markus Zizenbacher
Montage
Markus Zizenbacher
Sound
Claudia Joldes
Montage
Sebastian Schreiner
Sound
Rafael Haider
Sound Design
Eli Frauscher
Soundmix
Eli Frauscher
Animation
Ava Quintana Rodriguez-Smith
Archive Material
Sean DeLear, Anthony Robertson
Colour Correction
Tilmann Rödiger
Production
Markus Zizenbacher
Additional camera
Kurdwin Ayub
Supported by
Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport / Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport, Wien Kultur MA 7, Land Niederösterreich
with
Sean DeLear, Ann Magnuson, Scott Ewalt, Steve McDonald, Jeppe Laursen, Rick Owens, Michelle Lamy, Ali Janka, u.a. / et al.
Voice Over
Helen Parkes
Available Formats
DCP 2K flat (Distribution Copy)
Aspect Ratio
4:3
Frame Rate
25 fps
Color Format
colour, b/w
Festivals (Selection)
2024
Houston - Cinema Arts Festival
Lausanne LUFF Underground Film Festival
London - FRINGE! Queer Film & Arts Fest
Lissabon - Queerlisboa Lesbian & Gay Festival
San Francisco - frameline L&G Film Festival