ART STAR Opens in Toronto to RAVE REVIEWS

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

Dir: Pietra Brettkelly. 109 minutes.

Rating: NNNNN

See brilliant, privileged installation artist Vanessa Beecroft arrange human nudes and the word “exploitation” comes to mind. Watch her arrange Sudanese subjects in order to shed light on the slaughter in Darfur and the issue gets more complex. Follow her attempt to arrange the adoption of the Sudanese twins she breastfeeds on her first visit to Darfur – her own newborn is back home in America (!) – and your head spins.

These are just three of the many layers of this dizzying and dazzling meditation on art, inequality and responsibility. Director Pietra Brettkelly offers a nuanced portrait of the art star, who is not a villain. Beecroft’s heart is as big as her ego, and during a revealing conversation between her and her increasingly estranged husband, we get a grip on her internal logic. Her artwork is stunning, and the film is gorgeously photographed by Jacob Bryant, who taps into the intrinsically problematic aesthetics
of black and white. Awesome.

Source URL: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=film+portrait+of+an+art+star&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryCA

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The Art Star And The Sudanese Twins

Rating: ****

BY JASON ANDERSON March 18, 2009

That Vanessa Beecroft’s marriage ended after the filming of The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins is thoroughly unsurprising given the contents of Pietra Brettkelly’s discomfiting documentary. “My situation is falling apart,” says the artist at one point of her relationship with then-husband Greg Durkin. Though he is initially supportive of her, we can see how and why Durkin is troubled by the ramifications of — and underlying motivations for — Beecroft’s quest to adopt two Sudanese children whom she has featured in her work, which frequently addresses the gulf between the aestheticized experiences of the art world and the harsher realities of life outside the biennale circuit.

A terrific subject, the Beecroft that the film presents is an open, honest and earnest sort of person. That said, she’s frustratingly reluctant to acknowledge the consequences of her actions and The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins charts the damage that can be created by the best of intentions. In the process of documenting Beecroft’s flameout, Brettkelly makes some sharp observations about the vagaries of the contemporary art scene and the ethics of international baby shopping in the age of Madonna and Angelina Jolie. Given the clashing imperatives of conceptual art and contemporary altruism, it’s no wonder that Beecroft seems so frantic.

http://www.eyeweekly.com/film/onscreen/article/54944

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Adoption and artist's ego

Sun Rating: 4 out of 5

By LIZ BRAUN, SUN MEDIA
Friday, March 20, 2009


THE ART STAR AND THE SUDANESE TWINS
1 Hour, 49 Minutes
Starring: Vanessa Beecroft
Director: Pietra Brettkelly

Angelina Jolie and Madonna have adopted African babies. Have they started a trend?

That's just one of the ideas investigated in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, a terrific new documentary about performance artist Vanessa Beecroft and the African infants she wanted to call her own. As is so often the case with documentary films, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins started off as one thing and evolved into quite another.

New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly has an ongoing interest in international adoption and has already made one film about the subject. When she met performance artist Vanessa Beecroft by chance in South Sudan a few years ago, the women talked about the local twins Beecroft was thinking about adopting. Brettkelly asked if she could film Beecroft's adoption journey, not realizing that she'd wind up with a documentary that's just as much about contemporary art, extreme culture clash, Western perceptions of Third Worldcountries and notions of family. It's simultaneously biography, art history and political commentary, and it's entirely engaging.

Over 16 months, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins follows Vanessa Beecroft in her strange, determined quest to adopt twins she has encountered in the Sudan. The film opens with a look at VB61, Vanessa Beecroft's performance piece at the 52nd Venice Biennale -- art involving 30 Sudanese women pretending to be dead, and some red paint. It's an art/politics combo.

The action then goes back to 15 months earlier, with Beecroft in Africa talking about the children she wants to adopt. Here she is breastfeeding the twins who interest her and being photographed doing so; Beecroft had arrived in Africa while still nursing one of her own children, so she could nourish the starving twins. And get her picture taken while she did. There's a juxtaposition of maternal interest and cold commerce throughout the film that is very unsettling.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins captures Beecroft as she encounters various obstacles in her adoption attempts -- for example, the children, Madit and Mongor Akot, turn out to still have a father. Beecroft's efforts involve various local dignitaries and religious leaders and international lawyers, but it's interesting that she doesn't tell her own husband about her plans.

In the course of showing her single-minded pursuit of the kids, the movie introduces interviews with Beecroft's mother and father, with art experts and with Beecroft's own husband, social anthropologist Greg Durkin. The picture of Beecroft that slowly comes together is one of ruthless ego and bizarre sentiment. There are a handful of moments in the movie that cut painfully close to the heart of Beecroft's character -- a chat about a childhood friend she tormented for being stupid and ugly, for example, the way she hisses at her assistant, or her seeming indifference to the people around her. In one memorable scene, Beecroft is interrupted during a photo shoot by women in the village who object, strenuously, to the babies being naked in the church. She barricades the door against the women -- in their village, in their church, with their orphans.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins is a worrisome document about the first world view of Third World countries, but what it says about contemporary art gives the movie a rich vein of humour. (Or as Damien Hirst said about 20 years ago, "I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.")

"My husband says, 'You're so superficial,'" Beecroft admits in the movie; tough not to agree with him.

http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/columnists/liz_braun/2009/03/20/8817931-sun.html

also reprinted in http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Reviews/A/Art_Star_And_The_Sudanese_Twins/2009/03/20/8819551-sun.html

ART STAR More Reviews

A disturbing portrait of the artist as Lady Madonna

***

By RICK GROEN

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

Directed by Pietra Brettkelly Starring Vanessa Beecroft

Classification: PG

Vanessa Beecroft is the art star whose work - she's given to live tableaus of nude women posed motionless in a vast gallery space - has been exhibited around the world. Madit and Mongor are the Sudanese twins, motherless children left by their impoverished father to the care of a small village orphanage.

Fate decrees that the artist will cross paths with the twins, whereupon she is seized by twin urges - to personally adopt the infants and to professionally use them in her art. Meanwhile, fate further decrees that this intersection will come to the attention of New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, who is taken with a similar urge to pursue her aesthetic interest and benefit from the whole scenario by, of course, making a documentary.

Such is the background of this strange, frequently disturbing, sometimes rambling, always unnerving nexus between life's messy motives and art's ordered demands. Much of the footage focuses on Beecroft - stylish, cosmopolitan, in her early middle years - during a specific visit to Sudan to meet the infants, at that point merely months old. There, accompanied by her own photographer and a trusty assistant, she scurries about fretting over her dual tasks, conferring with various officials to promote the paperwork for the adoption, but also deploying the kids as models in a makeshift studio.

A single shot, carefully staged (she has brought along the dress for the occasion), obsesses her: The artist herself nursing the children, one at each breast, a pair of undernourished black babies suckled by a benevolent white woman. Later, in a Milan gallery, that photograph will excite much controversy and advance her career - learned commentators detect an admirable new maturity in her work.

To be sure, Beecroft is acutely aware of the fraught symbolism in the image - the colonial reverberations, the religious resonance, the pop culture winks at the acquisitive likes of Angelina Jolie and that other Madonna. This awareness definitely gives the photo its disturbing power, but, apparently, does nothing to deter Beecroft's continuing wish to bring the twins back to her New York home, to the place that houses her own two daughters, her Scandinavian nanny, her Jamaican housekeeper, and Greg her sociologist husband. Oh, one more thing: She has yet to inform Greg of her mission - the guy's completely unaware of any family additions.

A strange journey, indeed. En route, Brettkelly intermittently cuts away from Sudan to splice in interviews with the artist's Italian mother and English father and with Greg too, establishing her troubled psychiatric past (an OCD diagnosis, a stint on Zoloft) along with her rocky domestic present (the now-informed hubby strongly disapproves of the adoption). The film flirts with tedium here. At first intrigued, we, much like the folks around her, start to grow a bit weary of the egoist at the centre of the tale, and tired of watching cameras in search of footage shooting more cameras in search of other footage.

Still, there's something about Beecroft, with her softly whispering voice and her pre-Raphaelite air, that keeps bringing us back and drawing us in. So thoughtful one moment, so superficial the next, she's as shallow and deep as the art she creates. But our intrigue isn't confined to her. As the film tacks on a rather contrived climax, plus a provocative denouement, we wonder who is serving whom here, and how to measure the blurred line that separates those taking advantage from those being taken advantage of. Certainly, exploitation abounds here, and profitably so: The art star is touring the galleries; this film is making the rounds of the theatres.

As for the Sudanese twins, I'll obey my own aesthetic instinct and keep you in suspense about their eventual fate - yes, the exploitation continues.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/freeheadlines/LAC/20090320/AARTSTAR20/thearts/Arts

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The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

By Robert Bell

Vanessa Beecroft, the subject of this documentary, is fascinating from an artistic perspective, known for rendering large scale performance exhibitions with nude models — mostly female — whose interaction with the audience within a specific politically conscious space,channels esoteric ideas about identity, voyeurism and context.

Her exploration of Darfur and the Sudanese plight in "VB61 — Darfur: Still Death, Still Deaf?" helped bring ongoing issues to the forefront of the art community, which in turn brought forth a rash of philanthropic efforts from do-gooder artistes with a need to cleanse their consciences.

It seems that simply making the world aware of Sudanese problems was not enough for the inherently hypocritical, mercurial, conflicted and potentially delusional (you decide) artist, as her attentions turn to "saving" a pair of Sudanese twins named Madit and Mongor, whose mother has passed and whose father has no means of support. Allusions to the recent exploits of Madonna and Angelina Jolie are not unjustified, as issues of Western idealism and cultural insensitivity flounder about, along with the stability of the adoptee.

As Beecroft generally creates chaos in any given environment, citing artistic temperament in relation to self, one may question the motivations behind confronting the Sudanese justice system and religious sensibilities. She photographs children nude in a Sudanese church, regardless of the outrageous offence this shows to locals, gets well into the adoption process before communicating her intentions to her husband and two children, and endlessly pontificates about notions of exploitation and peer validation.

Brettkelly's documentary doesn't throw judgment onto her behaviour, rather it observes her in an often-poetic fashion that denies the commercial demands of the documentary medium. It raises more questions than it answers by observing both the shallow simplicity of rescue and the greater complications of ideology and fundamental beliefs, which cannot be "right" no matter how righteously some people believe them to be. (Kinosmith)

http://exclaim.ca/motionreviews/generalreview.aspx?csid2=5&fid1=37263&csid1=132

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ART STAR Editorials - People can't stop talking...

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins opens in Toronto on March 20 and Vancouver on March 27, with more Canadian dates to follow.

A portrait in pushing boundaries and people

Vanessa Beecroft's art shocks many viewers. And a new film suggests her methods can be just as controversial.

GUY DIXON
March 18, 2009

Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft, a white woman with reddish hair, is breastfeeding two black children, her breasts protruding through slits cut down the front of her dress.

She has a nurturing, if sombre, expression on her face. But the charred hem of her dress and the stark background of the image - one of the most controversial photos the Italian-born artist has made in recent years - places it far from the benign world view of, say, a Benetton ad.

Or does it? Why should the image of a woman breastfeeding two black children, in this case orphaned twins the artist tried to adopt in southern Sudan, be controversial at all? Why is it that some viewers detect an attitude of superiority toward these children?

These are some of the uncomfortable questions that come up in Pietra Brettkelly's documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, opening this Friday. But instead of merely showing the public reaction to Beecroft's work, the New Zealand-based director goes further - exploring how the image was created and the difficulties, many self-created, that Beecroft encountered along the way.

The filmmaker met the New York-based artist in the Sudan by chance while Beecroft was working on her photo project and Brettkelly was making a different documentary.

"She had gone out there to try to understand the whole Darfur situation with an Italian delegation," said Bretkelly. "She says that she was on a plane from New York to Italy at one stage and picked up a newspaper, and Darfur was on the front page. And she said, 'What is this? I think I need to understand it more.' "

In the film, Beecroft describes this sudden interest in the Sudan in breathless, accented English. But her voice also conveys a certain amazement and insistence that can come across as either naive or manipulative - except, perhaps, to Brettkelly.

The filmmaker talks about Beecroft as if she's still trying to understand her. And the film takes an objective stance on her work. The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins simply shows the intense factors surrounding Beecroft as she makes her art - from her obsessive failed attempt to adopt the twins (which nearly breaks up her marriage back in the United States) to her insistence on photographing the children (which upsets Sudanese locals).

In one of the most poignant scenes in the film, women from the orphanage try to stop Beecroft and her photographer (also white) from shooting the twins unclothed in the village church.

Beecroft is trying to capture them with the cherubic look they have throughout the photo series. But instead of heeding the locals, she races through the photo shoot in a panic - and at a certain point even barricades herself inside the church.

"What comes first, the genius or the personality? I've often asked people this," Brettkelly said. "She really pushes boundaries and pushes people. But is that her, or has the art community encouraged her to be like that, because the personality sells the art?

"That really interests me. I haven't quite decided which comes first. But I do think she is a genius. Just from talking to her, her command of language is extraordinary. How she thinks and writes, and what she references, and historically what she draws on, is amazing."

Beecroft's fame - and notoriety - first came from her installation pieces of naked women standing in galleries, posing often to the point of exhaustion. Questions about self-image and the act of observing are at the core of her work, which some art-world observers link to Renaissance painting in terms of its attentiveness to the human form and its sense of stillness. The photos in the Sudanese series also have clear religious references.

But Beecroft's work also straddles the line between art and fashion. This can make her more accessible, says Brettkelly - but can also be offensive to some viewers. For example, the film shows how digitally manipulated the Sudanese photos are: Beecroft's hair is changed and some of the unique characteristics of the location are removed from the image.

Even before she went to Africa, Beecroft included African women in her art. But as Brettkelly explained, the situation on the continent began to interest her, "so she thought, 'Well, I'm going to try to get to the actual scene.' " She ended up in southern Sudan, hundreds of miles from the western Darfur region.

As for filming Beecroft at work there, "I've never come across a subject that allowed me access all the time, every time," Brettkelly said. But the filmmaker also admitted that ultimately she found this exhausting, mainly, she hinted, because of the input Beecroft tried to have in the editing process.

But then the director stopped herself from saying more - she clearly wants the film to speak for itself, and for viewers to draw their own conclusions about Beecroft.

"I just think she's got this incredible drive to do her art. She can't live without doing art. Everybody in her life becomes part of her art. For her, there's no barrier. If she's experiencing something, she's photographing it or painting it," Brettkelly said.

"People either really love her or are disgusted or appalled by her behaviour ... One person [at a screening] said that Van Gogh was apparently a really hideous person [to be around], yet we find his work extraordinary. And therefore we should allow artists to do what they do."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090318.ASTAR18//TPStory/Entertainment

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Film portrait of an art star is not so black and white

Is controversial artist Vanessa Beecroft a genius or a narcissist who's gone too far?

March 19, 2009
PETER GODDARD SPECIAL TO THE STAR

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins may be the film world's most fearsome title since Snakes on a Plane.

Seeing an airborne Burmese python surely can't compare with horrifying visions of unspeakable indulgences conveyed by the very idea of the "art star." In this regard, Art Star delivers big time in its daunting portrait of Vanessa Beecroft. It opens in Toronto tomorrow at the Cumberland Theatre.

Over the years, the Italian-American performance artist's pathological fear of becoming fat has led her to pose silent battalions of nude or near-nude women before blasé wine-sipping art mavens at high-end museums and galleries. Museums everywhere still vie for her Playboy-esque, nubile installations.

Beecroft tops herself in Art Star, though. Her plan to adopt twin Sudanese orphans Madit and Mangor Akot as an art event – the artist sees herself as a retro-Renaissance Virgin Mary suckling the infants – makes similar cross-cultural adoption efforts by Madonna and Angelina Jolie seem wholly selfless by comparison.

One quickly comes to believe that Beecroft masochistically enjoys the universal condemnation hurled her way because of this plan. When a number of Sudanese churchwomen burst into a church where Beecroft is photographing the twins naked, the artist seems utterly bewildered. It's not right, the women insist. Beecroft doesn't understand. If she's doing it, it must be right.

So credit is due Pietra Brettkelly, Art Star's New Zealand director/producer, in humanizing an artist who's other observable talent is attracting invective worthy of a serial killer. (Following the film's appearance at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, one reviewer concluded that Beecroft is a "hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist.")

"I didn't want to just show all her attitude and how she treats people," says Brettkelly, who hadn't heard of Beecroft before they met in 2006 when the documentarian arrived in south Sudan shooting a doc based on New Zealanders living abroad. Brettkelly describes herself as "a general punter on the streets" when it comes to high-end art.

"I wanted the audience to feel (something for her) and not completely dislike her," Brettkelly elaborated during a recent interview. "I personally wouldn't want to go to a movie to just see somebody ranting.

"Besides, it wasn't hell all the time with her. There were some really great fun moments. She's great to have a glass of wine at the end of the day with. She's incredibly warm and friendly and encouraging and generous. Some days I was just so fond of her. Other days she was so frustrating, rude and abusive, and not just to me but to the people around her."

Beecroft's overwhelming self-centredness undermines Brettkelly's best intentions at every turn, though. The adoption plans, by no means welcome by Sudanese officials, catch social anthropologist Greg Durkin, the artist's husband, by surprise. He's aghast. "It's almost too selfish," he says.

Almost? Beecroft and Durkin have separated since Art Star's release, although Brettkelly told me she felt Durkin was "the rock" in Beecroft's life. The artist, although taken away at an early age from her English father by her Italian mother, seems to enjoy her jet-setting life. It's a way around not facing certain basic truths.

Aside from Brettkelly herself, Beecroft's apologists are found almost entirely in the art world, whose welfare depends in part on Beecroft's latest outrage.

"There's never been anything like the double breastfeeding photo," says the artist's New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch. "It is a disturbing beauty."

He's right. But that's not what Art Star is about. In the film, the disturbing beauty is the artist herself, who believes her excesses are not merely justified in the name of art; they are her art.

http://www.thestar.com/article/603827

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Artful dodger

A new doc explores artist Vanessa Beecroft's controversial adoption efforts

Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, left, together with her subject, artist Vanessa Beecroft.

(Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)

Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft's intention to adopt orphaned babies Madit and Mongor Akot comes under scrutiny in the film documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. (Vanessa Beecroft/Pietra Brettkelly)

The photograph is clearly meant to be a shove and a slap, and it is: A white woman in an angelic white dress, burnt along the bottom like a baked doily, nurses two black babies, one on each breast. In this portrait, the deified figures are not the babies, but the Madonna front and centre: Vanessa Beecroft, a 39-year-old Italian-British artist.

'There aren’t many people who feel lightly about Vanessa [Beecroft]. It’s either love or hate.'
— Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly

For her, the image is a piece of reverse colonialism, an attempt to rewrite the history of wet nurses of colour enlisted in the service of white Western women. But as with all of Beecroft’s work, the photograph is also painfully personal. In 2006, she travelled to Sudan and on her first day there met Madit and Mongor Akot at an orphanage. The baby boys needed to be nursed, and Beecroft stepped in, able to do so because she was still breastfeeding her youngest son in New York. Whether she bonded intensely with the children, or had a selfish urge to live out the Angelina Jolie fantasy of salvation through adoption — perhaps a combination of both — Beecroft began efforts to formally adopt the boys.

But Sudan has no laws around adoption and, indeed, no cultural concept of it. In this way, the now-famous portrait that resulted, like the story behind it, is not merely an artistic provocation, but an outrage to many, an extension of colonialism rather than a refutation.

For 16 months, New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly followed Beecroft around. The resulting documentary, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, has become a lightning rod for both the artist’s followers and those with strong opinions about international adoption. Echoing other reviews, a seething post on the blog of New York magazine last year read: “The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist.”

Brettkelly had no idea Beecroft was such a divisive figure when they met; in fact, she had never heard of her. The director was travelling the world working on a documentary about New Zealanders living abroad. She landed in Sudan's Darfur region, where she and her crew slept in a camp for aid workers and visitors. Amid that crowd, the strikingly beautiful Beecroft and her team of photographers and assistants stood out.

“We hooked up with her every night,” says Brettkelly, who is 42 and appears to share Beecroft’s glamorous tendencies, wearing a shimmering, floor-length black dress during an interview in a Toronto hotel room. “She said she was a performance artist and I had no idea what that meant. I thought she was just a dancer doing some wacky dancing in flowy, tie-dyed skirts.”

Brettkelly laughs now at her naïveté, but it served her well. When she discovered that Beecroft was interested in adopting, Brettkelly asked if she could film the process, and Beecroft agreed. “I kept asking why and she told me, ‘Because you know nothing about me,’” says Brettkelly.

Brettkelly only figured out she was dealing with a renowned conceptual artist when she joined Beecroft at the Venice Biennale in 2007 for a performance called VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?. There, Beecroft delivered a variation on her signature installations, in which groups of women stand or sit without moving for hours at a time. The direct feminism of those works — Beecroft, who has had a lifelong eating disorder, is in constant conversation with the female body as object — absorbed new meaning in Venice. The documentary shows Beecroft arranging 30 African women across a white floor, trailing red paint across their still bodies.

“I was incredibly moved,” Brettkelly says. “The stuff in L.A. with white models hadn’t done much for me, but this I understood.”

Both the art and the adoption end up receding in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. Instead, Beecroft’s private damage moves to the forefront: Her father and mother both make appearances in the film, describing an isolated, intellectual, precocious childhood in the Italian countryside. At one point in the film, Beecroft’s husband, Greg Durkin, now a film executive, is flabbergasted that she has initiated the adoption without informing him.

When Brettkelly showed Beecroft a 3½-hour cut of the doc, her subject was initially pleased. But after viewing the edited version, Beecroft sent Brettkelly a laundry list of things she wanted changed, and eventually enlisted a lawyer. Brettkelly says she didn’t alter the film based on Beecroft’s complaints, and it certainly doesn’t feel like a vanity project. The doc is sympathetic to Beecroft, who struggles with depression, but it isn’t always flattering. In one particularly difficult scene, Beecroft is shooting the babies in a church in Sudan when a few local women pound the door, outraged that the children are being photographed naked, and accusing Beecroft’s translator of corroborating with “the whites.”

Brettkelly recalls that as the screaming escalated, she considered putting down the camera and getting involved. “My camera man was beside me and I said, ‘Oh God, what do I do? What do I do? Am I going to step in here?’ But really quickly I could see these women didn’t need some white woman to step in. They knew what was right and wrong in their world, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m fine right here, behind the camera.’ ”

Anyone who wants to write off Beecroft can zone in on her casual white privilege, especially when she bars the door to the church and mutters, “Christ, these people.” But Brettkelly’s film also constantly reminds the viewer that Beecroft is a fiercely driven artist, doing whatever it takes to produce the work she genuinely thinks will change the world. Subtly, the doc asks whether male and female artists are scrutinized or judged in the same way. Is it too simple to dismiss a fashionable, beautiful woman preoccupied by food and the female body — the former considered trivial and the latter an obsession historically left to male artists?

Of their relationship today, Brettkelly says, “It’s incredibly rough. She’s very up and down. She was tough at times, but also incredibly generous. It’s not a friendship, but it has intimacy. I’m always very careful how I am with her. She’s a woman who has achieved amazing things. She’s a brilliant artist. I can’t judge how she has to operate in that world.” Brettkelly pauses. “But to judge someone in a developing country interacting with the locals, that’s a different story.”

Despite the threatened lawsuit, Beecroft appeared at Sundance in 2008 and defended herself, and has become more famous because of the film, collaborating with Kanye West on a performance to launch his last album. She and her husband are also in the process of a divorce, according to Brettkelly.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins continues to divide audiences. Brettkelly describes a screening where a man stood up and said, “I find this appalling. It’s disgusting.” Another woman in the audience cut him off. “She said: ‘I completely identify with her. She thinks differently than us. She’s an artist. She’s showing us a way into issues we don’t talk about.’ There aren’t many people who feel lightly about Vanessa. It’s either love or hate.”

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.

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