Sugar Town

Colour, 35mm
USA, 1998, 100 min
Section: Forum of Independents

Synopsis

What would you do to make it in the music business? Sleep with a record producer? Play guitar for a sexy singer who just wants to get you into bed? Finance a junkie’s fatal habit just long enough for him to write you one hit song? Steal, lie, cheat? Probably all this and maybe even more. Allison Anders and Kurt Voss return to the world of Border Radio with the bitter-sweet comedy Sugar Town, a convincing portrait of the seedier side of the LA music scene, filled with has-beens living in the past and wannabes doomed to mediocrity.

About the director

Allison Anders was born in Ashland, Kentucky and spent her adolescence running away from home and hitchhiking around the country, sometimes ending up in jail or an institution. At 18, she left for England and returned with a baby girl. She settled in LA, worked as midwife and a waitress in a bar, while studying philosophy and writing poetry. She decided to study film at UCLA, where she shot her first film on Super 8, Nobody Home. Anders is the mother of three children. Films: Border Radio (with Kurt Voss and Dean Lent, 1989), Gas Food Lodging (1992), Mi Vida Loca (1993), Four Rooms (episode The Missing Ingredient, 1995), Grace of My Heart (1996), Sugar Town (with Kurt Voss, 1999), Things Behind the Sun (2001). Kurt Voss see Down and Out with the Dolls