Jessica Yu met the late Ted Shen, a frequent Reader arts contributor, in 2000, when Yu was here giving a talk on The Living Museum, her documentary about self-taught artists in a Queens psychiatric center. Shen asked her whether she was familiar with Henry Darger, the reclusive Chicago janitor who died in 1973, leaving behind hundreds of paintings depicting the child heroines of his 15,000-page epic novel titled in part “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.” When she said yes, Shen offered to introduce her to the artist’s former landlady, Kiyoko Lerner, and show her Darger’s old room. “So the next day I’m in Ted’s rickety little car and we’re driving up to Kiyoko’s place,” Yu recalls. “It was such an amazing experience to go into that room that was still intact.” The room was a chockablock jumble of paintings, drawings, books, clippings, and Catholic icons. Yu stayed for four hours, and not long afterward arranged to shoot footage of the studio. It was dismantled later that year, most of its contents donated to museums around the country. Five years later her portrait of Darger and his work, In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger, has her short-listed for an Oscar.
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Yu next began trying to muster postproduction funding, applying for a grant from the Independent Television Service, the nonprofit that underwrites many PBS documentaries. ITVS offered her completion money–but by then she realized that the documentary would exceed the mandated 60-minute running time. Reluctantly, she turned it down. The following year, however, she got a call from ITVS director Patrick Wickham, who asked her to resubmit her proposal, promising to find a way to waive the length requirement.
For more on In the Realms of the Unreal, see J.R. Jones’s review in Section 1.
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