Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

Directing

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

Born 1988-01-01

Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli works as a film director, editor, colourist and critic living in New York. She has directed two feature films, So Pretty, (2019, Berlinale) a literary translation/transposition focusing on gender and the utopian imagination, and Empathy (2016, FID Marseille), a performative documentary following a heroin-addicted escort across the USA.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Life Story poster
NR

Pairing an original text by philosopher McKenzie Wark (Hacker Manifesto, Raving) with slowly-strobing orange-hued images of her body and domestic life, framed by techno and the most stripped-down version of the rave’s aesthetics, this semi-documentary delicately merges the history of the left with the history of Wark's body as laid bare before the camera. We see the marks of her gender transition and her life story as she speaks of love and lost futures, even as both her own death and the death of the left hover just out of frame. A love story.

Life Story

2024

Life Story poster
NR

Pairing an original text by philosopher McKenzie Wark (Hacker Manifesto, Raving) with slowly-strobing orange-hued images of her body and domestic life, framed by techno and the most stripped-down version of the rave’s aesthetics, this semi-documentary delicately merges the history of the left with the history of Wark's body as laid bare before the camera. We see the marks of her gender transition and her life story as she speaks of love and lost futures, even as both her own death and the death of the left hover just out of frame. A love story.

Life Story

2024

Empathy poster
2.0

Em is an escort girl and a heroin addict. From New York to Los Angeles via Pittsburgh, Em’s daily life is revealed.

Empathy

2016

No artwork available
4.0

A three-minute ambient film set to original music by Rovinelli, this never-before-screened film filters a gay sexual encounter through a grid of flashing colors, and stars the noted rapper Kalifa / Le1f.

Untitled

2009

Fuck Work poster
NR

Identity and performance, resistance and submission, and monotony and quiet rage crash into one another in this clear-eyed vision of a lesbian working as a professional dominatrix with a police officer as a regular client.

Fuck Work

2015

Fuck Work poster
NR

Identity and performance, resistance and submission, and monotony and quiet rage crash into one another in this clear-eyed vision of a lesbian working as a professional dominatrix with a police officer as a regular client.

Fuck Work

2015

No artwork available
NR

In Rovinelli’s scuzzy thesis film, a young man has sex with an older man for money, adopts a cat, and rides a bicycle.

We've Loved You So Much

2010

So Pretty poster
4.6

Four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel "So schön" by Ronald M. Schernikau.

So Pretty

2019

So Pretty poster
4.6

Four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel "So schön" by Ronald M. Schernikau.

So Pretty

2019

So Pretty poster
4.6

Four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel "So schön" by Ronald M. Schernikau.

So Pretty

2019

Marriage Story poster
10.0

An auto-fiction under the eyes of a female Christ, a marriage as a step into the forbidden land of the holy, a lesbian poem in the language of the divine, a paean to the color red, the world's slowest rave.

Marriage Story

2020

Marriage Story poster
10.0

An auto-fiction under the eyes of a female Christ, a marriage as a step into the forbidden land of the holy, a lesbian poem in the language of the divine, a paean to the color red, the world's slowest rave.

Marriage Story

2020