Dir: Pinky Bardo
Key cast: Pinky Bardo, Fox Killdeer
Synopsis: Stolen Sex Tapes is a feature length documentary by and about the husband-wife punk rock duo of Pinky Bardo and Fox Killdeer - known musically as Bardos (f.k.a Cursed Arrows). Edited by Pinky Bardo, it is compiled from several years’ worth of footage that explores touring, living, loving and making art together.
Featuring live performances introduced with dates, locations and often lyric fragments on a black screen, the film intercuts performances and audience reactions with video clips of both artists in their everyday life. Raw, cinema vérité scenes (often subtitled for auditory clarity) show philosophical discussions about the nature of reality jostling with candid, rolling documentation of their personal lives. Fox walking through sunlit woods, talking and gesturing soundlessly. Pinky sitting on the ground somewhere in the afternoon, looking away from the camera. Fox standing around a campfire at night, face lit from below in the grainy video. Pinky nude, lying submerged in a bathtub, her tattoos standing out against her skin in the black and white footage.
Overlaid audio from media interviews as well as candid conversations caught on camera form the loose narrative of their lives, guiding the viewer’s experience of their artistic, convention-defying world through all of its pain and beauty. For these two, the music and their lives are too tightly intertwined to be easily separated.
From living on the road, to serious health scares, to slowing down and evolving their family dynamic with the birth of their first child, the film offers gems of insight into the fascinating, deeply lived life of Bardos.
While the title might hold the implication of a voyeuristic indulgence in someone else’s intimate acts, this film subverts that somewhat, instead showing you scenes of deep emotional intimacy deliberately captured and offered up as freely and genuinely as their art and their music.
Stolen Sex Tapes, despite the titillation that its title might suggest, is a visually dreamy meditation on survival, commitment and art, heavily punctuated by the driving sounds of the duo’s music.
Quote: “What’s the most important thing that’s happened to you lately?” “Everything.”
~Review + synopsis from "A Movie Year" blog (2016)
~Review + synopsis from "A Movie Year" blog (2016)