Ink & Linda – A Film by Stuart C. Paul

WATCH THE TRAILER

NEWS

Richmond International Film Festival

Ink & Linda will be screening on June 11 at the Richmond International Film Festival.

The Richmond International Film Festival (RIFF), brings a six-day cutting edge event of 171 award-winning film premieres from the U.S. and 22 countries – from Germany to Japan, Syria to Switzerland – plus 22 national and international bands, panels, red carpet and signature community events at various venues across Richmond. The festival kicks off Tuesday, June 7 and concludes Sunday, June 12.

Ink & Linda wins Best Documentary at the 2022 Dance Camera West Film Festival!

ABOUT THE FILM

Ink & Linda is a feature-length documentary chronicling the unexpected friendship and collaboration between Inksap, a Vietnamese-American urban artist in his 20s, and Linda, an elder stateswoman of the modern dance scene in her 70s–as they team up to form LA’s most unlikely street art duo. Crossing the boundaries between generations and cultures, their story defies the conventions of art and society, exploring what it means to be an artist in today’s world. It is the story of a young man finding his identity; a woman in the last chapter of her life starting a new one; and of finding family where you least expect it.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

“What is it about those two?”

That is the question I get asked most often. Linda and Inksap’s relationship is mystifying to outsiders. People find it difficult to understand what a 20-something Vietnamese-American street artist and a septuagenarian body movement guru could possibly have in common.

If the documentary attempts to answer that question, it only does so by stepping back and letting Linda and Inksap tell their story–for the tale of how they came together and where their friendship and collaboration has taken them speaks for itself. There is a certain magic at work–a strange synchronicity that if you allow it, can convince you that there is more to this world than random chance.

Linda and Inksap’s story is a romance, but their relationship is not romantic. It is a tale of two outsiders from different worlds who found meaning within one another.

As much as Linda is a mentor, guiding her young protege to discover the courage to embrace his authentic self, Inksap is also her teacher, ushering her into the world of street art and awakening her youthful spirit of rebellion. Their connection goes beyond the streets of Los Angeles, reaching back decades to its beginnings when Inksap’s family fled the Vietnam War as refugees.

In a time when the world is only getting more divisive, this is a film that breaks down barriers and reminds us that there is more that unites us than divides us. It crosses the boundaries of generations, artistic disciplines, cultures, social norms and even legality.

Street art is an act of rebellion. What they do is illegal, cloaked under cover of night. The streets, rooftop and walls of the city comprise their canvas; their audience is every passerby. My hope with this film is to in some way, capture a piece of the intimacy, trust, excitement and spontaneous combustion that I witnessed between Linda and Inksap. For Ink and Linda, art and love are one in the same. And if art is an act of revolution, then love is the most revolutionary of acts.

BIOS

MEET THE CAST

LINDA LACK

Linda Lack Ph.D. is a widely-respected dancer, choreographer, educator, innovator and influencer in the field of Movement/Yoga Therapy. She has performed all over the world, from dances on stage to movement rituals in desert stream beds. While dancing in New York in the 1960s, Linda saw her fellow dancers suffering from injuries and began creating her own exercises to help the body survive the rigors of life and art.

In 1970, she returned to Los Angeles and created The Thinking Body-The Feeling Mind®, a comprehensive movement technique useful in supporting injured bodies on their way to healing as well as sustaining demanding and accomplished movers. The Thinking Body-The Feeling Mind®has been recognized alongside Pilates, Feldenkrais, Bartenieff

and Alexander Technique as a contemporary movement training/healing method. Linda describes TBFM as the owner’s manual for the body that was never issued to us at birth. She credits the technique she created with sustaining her well into her 70s as she continues to teach, train and heal both at her studio in Los Angeles and across the globe.

INKSAP

The Artist known as INKSAP creates works of art that can be found on the streets and in galleries. His signature style is known as ARTIFACT: collections of discarded materials layered in repetition with organic movement and folding, completed with painted images of face masked Vietnamese refugees.

In 2015 he began incorporating environmental issues and initiatives into his artwork. His debut work – titled Xuanha – features a young girl wearing a face mask carrying a tree in her backpack. This image, burned into a silkscreen then printed onto paper, has been installed in numerous urban settings. With his work well-received in personal interactions and on social media, INKSAP has gone on to create more paintings of face masked children through this process. Discovering the streets serve as a more vital canvas than studio walls, INKSAP shifted his focus towards public artwork.

Based in Los Angeles, California, INKSAP has an expansive presence through his installations in Tokyo, New York City, Ho Chi Minh City, Budapest, Xi’an, Shanghai, Beijing, and Nantong. Over time, INKSAP’s work has evolved into exploring his Vietnamese heritage and the complexities of his upbringing. Brought up in a community lacking Vietnamese influence, INKSAP lost his cultural identity. It is through integrating moments of INKSAP’s family history into his street installations that he renews himself, visceral and emotionally bonding with the art.

The Art of INKSAP is internationally recognized as well as followed by East Coast critics, West Coast creatives, and global art lovers alike. The ease of access to public art he provides is a testament to the talent and impact of the artist known as INKSAP.

MEET THE FILMMAKERS

STUART C. PAUL

DIRECTOR / PRODUCER / CINEMATOGRAPHER

Stuart C. Paul is a screenwriter and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, he is known for his ability to elevate whatever genre he is working in, bringing his unique blend of intelligence, point-of-view and character depth to each project he undertakes.

Ink and Linda is his first documentary feature. Previously, he wrote and directed the award-winning comedy short The Lord Of Catan. Starring Amy Acker and Fran Kranz, the film tells the cautionary tale of a married couple whose game night plunges them into a vortex of madness and destruction.

He is currently in pre-production on A Boy Called Lee, which explores the issues of juvenile justice, truancy and gun violence through the lens of Lee Harvey Oswald’s time spent in a New York juvenile psychiatric facility. He is also at work on Infernal, a feature-length horror film that examines the concept of the devil through the lens of self-actualization and mental health.

As a screenwriter, he has worked with acclaimed directors across many different genres, including Takashi Miike, Anton Corbijn and Roland Emmerich. He has sold projects to companies all across Hollywood including MGM, Universal, NBC, STX and more. His original screenplay Yasuke was included on the 2021 Black List, the film industry’s annual honor roll of the most acclaimed unproduced film scripts of the year.

Also an acclaimed comic creator, his graphic novel Ides Of Blood, which reimagines the assassination of Julius Caesar by vampires, was published by DC Comics. The series was nominated for three CBG Fan Awards, including Best Writer.

In his spare time, he practices Japanese swordsmanship and takes his cat on hikes.

He is represented by Paradigm and Circle of Confusion.

HEATHER MATHEWS

EDITOR / PRODUCER

Heather Mathews edited, produced and co-wrote the Emmy/Television Academy Honor winning feature documentary Forbidden: Undocumented & Queer in Rural America and has edited many other award winning documentary & narrative films. Prior to becoming an editor, she worked for David Fincher’s Special Projects division at Anonymous Content where she worked on jobs like the BMW Short Films project with directors such as Wong Kar-wai, John Frankenheimer and Alejandro Gonzales Inñaritu. She worked for Tony Scott at RSA, Gary Ross at Universal and Scott Rudin at Paramount. In 2007 she returned to school to get her MFA at the American Film Institute and since graduating in 2009 has been editing and producing.

MANDY HOFFMAN

COMPOSER

Mandy Hoffman is a visionary composer who has been writing for various mediums for over a decade, and is a member of The Academy. She has scored numerous films, series, advertisements, and art installations that have appeared in theaters, top film festivals, television networks and galleries all over the world. Recently her music has moved to the concert stage, with works premiered by The Orchestra Moderne at Lincoln Center (2019) and The Hollywood Chamber Orchestra at The Wiltern in Los Angeles (2018).

Her collaborations with director Azazel Jacobs have garnered critical acclaim, and her orchestral score to A24’s The Lovers (2017) not only received abundant praise from the press, but it ended up on Film Music Magazine’s Top Ten Best Scores of 2017. It was also called “..a stealth contender for one of the finest film music of the century so far” by The Moveable Fest. She worked with director Minhal Baig and executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith on the poetic feature Hala (Overbrook Entertainment), which premiered at Sundance 2019 and then on Apple TV+.

Hoffman teamed up with Joey Soloway on the lauded Amazon Studios series titled I Love Dick (2017), and her music can be found on a myriad of television shows. Most recently she scored the Anna Kendrick led comedy, Dummy on Quibi (2020).

She is active in the composer and film communities, and often appears on panels discussing her craft. She is a repeat guest lecturer at Steinhardt’s Screen Scoring Graduate Program (NYU), at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema/Media Scoring (CUNY), and at Sound Thinking (CAT).