Alla nazimova documentary youtube
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Weekend salons at her extravagant mansion were the hub of early Hollywood’s social and queer scenes. It was produced by three-time Tony award winner Pat Addiss who will continue with the show’s life.
We plan to partner with the Eastman Museum to present the first public showing of a restored digital print of Nazimova’s film Stronger Than Death in rep with the play here in NYC, across the country, and internationally in the “Stronger Than Death Tour”.
Now more than ever, theatre has an important role to give voice to tolerance, celebrate diversity, and take back our collective herstory. We are all the stories we tell. She was so shatteringly powerful that I couldn’t stay in my seat.”
– Tennessee Williams, Playwright
Alla fled antisemitism, persecution, and censorship in Russia to make her New York debut in 1903 performing in Russian for Jewish emigres.
Her guest list included the era’s leading artists, writers, and actors, such as movie legends Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and director George Cukor.
A public facade of marriage granted Alla the private freedom to be unapologetically bisexual. The importance of tolerance in society cannot be emphasized enough.
She defied the moral and artistic codes of her time that eventually forced her into obscurity, “silenced under the smoldering rubble of forgotten history”.
The evocative black and white video and sweeping original score envelop the performer in a live silent film - a hybrid of film & theatre. “As we silently, separately scratch shadows onto walls that are trying to divide us, closing in on us, once again.
Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Last Tycoon at the hotel.
“The Garden of Allah, for one brief moment, was Camelot.”
– Sheilah Graham, Writer and Resident of the Garden of Allah
1923 – Alla’s home and The Garden of Allah Hotel
1920s – Alla in her library at the Garden of Alla
Alla’s impact was also profound off-screen.
Sunday was reserved for pool parties with “The Sewing Circle,” code for Hollywood’s queer women. a stunning event.”
— Virginia Schneider, The Hollywood Times
“DASH DO NOT WALK, TO EXPERIENCE GARDEN OF ALLA: THE ALLA NAZIMOVA STORY.”
“One-woman piece de resistance.”
”An impressive, vivid portrait …enlivened by Nordlinger’s dynamic, captivating presence.”
– Ed Rampell, Hollywood Progressive
GARDEN OF ALLA WAS NOMINATED
FOR SEVERAL AWARDS
Best Actress in a Drama by the LA Robby awards, alongside such stellar talent as Elizabeth McGovern, Amy Brenneman.
Best Original Score
Robby Awards
Best Projection Design
Robby Awards
Best Projection Design
Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle
Romy's original multimedia solo show Garden of Alla, tells the true story of Alla Nazimova, the rule-breaking, lesbian Broadway and Hollywood legend.
As Nazimova said, “an artist is only dead when the last person to remember them dies”. Garden of Alla is a clarion call reminding us that individually we can make a difference and we all have a story to tell. The show can be performed without any multimedia and can be adapted to any space.
“NOT TO BE MISSED!”
“Extraordinary talent, an unbelievable true story, and a fascinating character….
Her work has taken her to over 40 countries to film stories about a wide range of subjects, including news, history, wildlife, and the environment.
Paymar’s independent work includes documentaries about a nonprofit empowering women in Sri Lanka, a groundbreaking memory care center, pioneering AIDS documentary, For Our Lives, and Sippie, about classic blues artist Sippie Wallace (Co-Directed with Roberta Grossman).
She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film Directing from the American Film Institute and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
Down.”
Garden of Alla has been presented in the curated programs at HERE Theater, the Players Club, Dixon Place, 59E59, and the Edinburgh Fringe, and most recently, at the legendary nightclub The Cutting Room. “By opening our eyes to the past, we are better able to see our present”.
Homophobia, sexism, racism, antisemitism, ageism: Nazimova was fighting these contemporary struggles back in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, but alone and without a Twitter account.
Then – astonishingly – Alla Nazimova was forgotten.
Alla – Beyond the Gardenexplores Alla’s extraordinary contributions to film and theater and celebrates the legacy of a woman who lived boldly on and off stage.
The film aims to restore Alla to her rightful place in the pantheon of iconic American stage and screen legends.
This visual landscape of atmospheric textures echoes Nazimova's thoughts, layered with scratched celluloid, as if from a flickering silent movie projector. She headed her own production company, became a movie star at forty, and established the template for the exotic, sexually sophisticated “foreign” woman emulated by later European screen giants, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
Alla in Madame Peacock, 1920
Alla inCamille with Rudolf Valentino, 1921
42-year old Alla playing a teenage Salome , 1922
Alla’s daring film adaptation of queer playwright Oscar Wilde’s notorious Salomé, then banned in England for “spreading homosexuality and encouraging moral corruption,” is recognized as a classic of LGBTQ+ cinema and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.
The Garden hosted one of the most notorious and longest-running parties of the Roaring Twenties despite Prohibition’s alcohol restrictions. In September 2019 it was presented at the Kennedy Center in association with Tonic Theatre Company. A Jewish Crimean immigrant fleeing programs, persecution and censorship in Tsarist Russia, she became a Broadway legend, the highest paid silent movie star in Tinseltown, and the first female director/producer/writer in Hollywood.