When Austin-based filmmakers Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan embarked on their latest project – documenting a season at a Florida nudist resort – they were aware that in order to make the film they wanted, they had to adopt the local dress code. “There’s no way you can show up with a camera and your clothes on and make a film,” Lucas said. “I remember looking at Patrick at one point during shooting and being like, ‘Well, it’s time to take our clothes off.'”
The film they shot au naturel, Naked Gardens, receives its world premiere in the documentary competition at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York (one of three Austin-linked films scheduled, alongside experimental relationship drama Three Headed Beast and the latest from Andrew Bujalski, There There). Naked Gardens follows a handful of residents, led by owner and operator Morley, of the Sunsport Gardens Family Naturist Resort as they prepare for their annual Mid-Winter Naturist Festival, attempt to maintain affordability as the cost of living increases, and continue to rebel against the norms of society. It is partly inspired by the photography of Diane Arbus, whose own au naturel journeys into the dingy, run-down nudist resorts of Sixties New Jersey and Pennsylvania are well known. Lucas and Bresnan incorporated their own method of direct cinema, spending six months embedded in Loxahatchee conducting research and shooting. “When we were active at the resort,” Bresnan said, “we were spending just as much time getting to know people as we were filming. That balance was key to being able to make the film.” It’s a balance, an authenticity, that is often hard to achieve in documentaries.
As Lucas explained, “There’s two stereotypes: There’s the helicopter style, where you come in and out and engage just enough, and then there’s the fly-on-the-wall style, where you’re there but you don’t engage at all. We’re neither. We wanted to fully experience the community and people off-camera, so we could be present in moments where there was some revelation.”
“I remember looking at Patrick at one point during shooting and being like, ‘Well, it’s time to take our clothes off.’”– Ivete Lucas
This engagement is key to understanding the work of the filmmakers. Through two features and a half-dozen shorts, Lucas and Bresnan have created a body of work that depicts the outliers, the people on the margins of society who, as Lucas said, “don’t feel like they belong or are not taken into account in our consciousness of who we are in our culture.” Take “Happiness Is a Journey,” a short they made in 2019. That film follows Bear Lopez, a 60-year-old East Austin resident, as he delivers newspapers on the night of Christmas Eve. It’s an elegy for a dying industry, and a record of a neighborhood on the verge of extinction. The community of Naked Gardens faces similar struggles of survival in a world that increasingly has no need for them. The film raises questions of where people can go who are being pushed away, and at the same time captures a small slice of paradise. It’s generous and compassionate, and very bittersweet.
While the duo is preparing for their Tribeca premiere, they’re also preparing, unfortunately, to relocate to North Carolina, as the Clarksville property they’ve lived on for a decade is about to be sold. It’s an irony not lost on the filmmakers, and the realization that Austin has become unrecognizable to them, and a place where they are unable to sustain their lifestyle, is a common one. “Capitalism only values things that make money, so you don’t have a space for humanity,” Lucas said. “It comes up in all of our movies: People find less and less space to do things that matter for each other. So that is, at the end of the day, what we’re fighting to continue to make films about. So that maybe someday we can find the space to do these things and not feel like the ground is being pulled out from underneath our feet all the time.”
Naked Gardens screens as part of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival in New York, June 8-19. More info at tribecafilm.com.
Tribeca Screenings
Fri., June 10, 5:45pm, Village East by Angelika
Sat., June 11, 5:15pm, Tribeca Film Center
Thu., June 16, 5:45pm, Village East by Angelika
This article appears in June 10 • 2022.