Exist

With all of her work, Esther Bell always manages to take her camera to places that most film audience members would be uninvited to go. She does this not with elaborate staging and sets, but accomplishes her purpose by shooting within the actual environment of her story.

Her films are the excellent reverses of traditional time and socio-economic period pieces. She is a filmmaker who is first-person-familiar with the characters and conditions she brings to the screen.

With her second film, Exist, Esther proves again that she is a skilled artist. Her genius is in presenting the here and now of a separate sub-cultural world that would otherwise have remained one-dimensional and stereotyped in our mind's judgment.

Esther opens our eyes for a second look even as her lead character also discovers that first impressions can be condemning fatal. "Exist" is a journey of discovery turned upside down and inside out. It is a film neither dressed up for show, nor dressed down for impact. It is what it really is, and therein exists a mystery.

As you leave the theater you have to admit, "I've not actually been there, and done that before." And when next you think you have, you'll probably be blindly wrong again.