Staff Pick Premiere: "Charlotte" by Zach Dorn |

In this Week's Staff Pick Premiere, forgotten folk musician Lena Black discovers her fifty-year-old track "Charlotte" is being reconstructed into a smash pop hit. Set in the aftermath of the release, filmmaker Zach Dorn explores how the influence of the original song has on Lena as well as her daughter Diane and her eleven-year-old grandchild, Eli.

In her letter to the pop star, Lena writes: "There is more to it than forgetting in the first place, which is being not understood." This central theme is embedded throughout the film as the newfound popularity reveals the old hurts. Through a collection of fragmented conversation - including the letter of Lena, Diane's call and Eli's cassette recording - Dorn creates a touching depiction of a family that begins to hear each other through the music.

If asked about his distinctive structure for the film, Dorn shared: "I loved the conceit of exploring these relationships but never seeing the family interact with one another. In presenting the narrative through isolated monologues I wanted it to appear as though they were all creating each their own versions of the same song. The story is divided by generation, geographical, and emotional gap, however, I hope, something at the core of their worries will eventually lead to the same tune."

The tune may be familiar to viewers who've experienced their families drift apart, but "Charlotte" is unlike any other family drama that we've seen on the . Utilizing hand-crafted puppets as well as stop-motion animation, Dorn invites us to join in their stories, experiences, and imaginations to create an emotional journey.

 Ahead of the release, we reached out to Dorn to hear more about his inspiration, process, and style. Read on to hear more about "Charlotte."

 On the film's inspiration:

"In 2019, I made a puppet show about world's largest sponge and the TV series Gilmore Girls. A few days ago, as I was buying some mini-craft supplies at the faux floral aisle of a Michael's craft store, Carly Rae Jepsen's rendition of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" was played on the loudspeaker. The song is extremely upbeat a great bubbly pop song that is a bit odd considering the original song is rather complex and mournful. The feeling was awe-inspiring, because I loved the Carly Rae cover so much. To me, the version with pop lyrics although it was less slick, still possessed all the emotions of Joni Mitchell's original. I felt conflicted and embarrassed at this thought, yet was able to imagine Carly Rae jepsen and Joni Mitchell's versions of "Both Sides Now" as they conversed. This conversation eventually became the script for "Charlotte ."

 When making the script

"I imagined the original rendition of "Charlotte" as an radio show, a sort of an Joe Frank voyeuristic drama, that was set in miniature worlds, without puppets. I wrote the lyrics from the perspective of eight characters who all experienced a professional or personal relationship that revolved around the song "Charlotte." After having spent time getting acquainted with the characters Diane and Eli considered to be the most fascinating which is why I kept them in the mix along with Lena and the pop star T.Y.M. After I had figured out this it was time to spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to make their stories interspersed."

 On the music collaboration:

"When I wrote "Charlotte," I always had the musician Jenna Caravello in mind. As I was writing the script, I sent her fictional Rolling Stone interviews including Lena Black and some of fake diary entries. From this material, Jenna wrote the folk song.

 I sent Jenna's song to Zhenya Golikova who I connected with online. In 2020, Zhenya covered these voice memo melodies I wrote for my girlfriend. They were funny and silly songs about cats and marshmallows and missing someone in another country, and the following year, Zhenya transformed my songs into amazing ballads. The music she created has that early Magnetic Fields vibe, like the songs were written underwater by wild marine monkeys.. Jenna's track was sent to her and she had her own version of the song a week after. ."

 on the talk-show program:

"So numerous female folk singers from the 1960s and 70s were largely ignored. Musicians like Vashti Bunyan Karen Dalton, Linda Perrhacs, and The Roches were either ignored or marginalized into categories like "freak folk," and never taken as seriously as their male counterparts. There's fascinating contradiction in that folk music is regarded as having modernist ideals but is bogged in a certain sort of unspoken gender-based misogyny.

 In the mind of these musicians I was imagining Lena at this point in her career, where in order to stay relevant, she'd have to participate in the 1970s Laurel Canyon lifestyle, party with the right people and take the proper drugs , and live in a world created and governed by men. But I don't believe she'd want to do that. Maybe due to her motherhood and maybe she saw Through It All. I'm not certain. It was just her sorrow - which spanned a lifetime mourning the loss of a profession. What does she do with her anger? What happens to her grief? out for her daughter? In thinking about these concerns, I tried to write Lena's interaction with Sam as a prelude to her relationship to her child."

 On developing his unique visual style:

 "In my early 20s, I trained as a puppeteer. However, I was never any good at doing it. I'm missing an 8th of my brain and I believe it has led to a absence of spatial awareness. The idea of building or manipulating something with three dimensions was not feasible. It was a good thing I was able to get involved in Toy Theater, a type of two-dimensional puppetry once used in the 19th century England. I started building tiny dioramas out of matte board and acrylics, like pop-up books, and I manipulated live-projecting digital cameras inside of them, while telling stories about my landlord or dead dog.

 I obsess over the details of everything, no matter the bar code on a Doritos bag, or the shape of a McDonald's Happy Meal box. Perhaps because I don't have a brain, I'm not able to make straight lines or shape anything too realistically - so I'm a bit of a which is like a mashup of something falling apart and obsessed.

 For the puppets, I worked with stop motion animators Oliver Levine and Lily Windsor to maintain a slightly grotesque and textural style that was appropriate to the film's hand-painted universe. Because I created the film in the lockdown, we worked on a long-distance basis, Lily from Chicago, mailing tiny boxes of llamas, as well as Oliver leaving head sculpts at my front door in Burbank ."

 The next step:

 "Currently I'm creating a short film on the CGI Livia Soprano from the third season of The Sopranos, as well as this genetic mutation called BRCA2. I was raised in an Italian American family filled with many eccentric customs and personalities, but by my late 20s, the BRCA2 caused the break-up of these family bonds by causing the death of family members.

 In the year 2020, I viewed The Sopranos for the first time. Each show felt as if I had a conversations with my family once more. Today, I'm creating the film that recreates home movies with stop-motion footage and examine Livia Soprano's posthumous performance the context of my own personal experiences with grief ."