Maripol

After an injury, Graham suffers from short-term memory loss, which causes him to fall back into the abyss of amnesia every 10 minutes. Those around him both profit and suffer from his condition -- his sex-crazed boss, Sabine, tricks him into regular trysts, while his family tries to come to terms with the situation. But when temp Irene starts working at Graham's company, they fall into an affair that begins to make a mark on his memory.

The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into.

The life and work of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat have been marked by a long quest for identity, by his Haitian and Puerto Rican family origins and by a founding trip to Africa. To portray this major painter of the 20th century, who died in 1988 at only 27 years old, is also to evoke the place of black American artists in the conservative and racist America of the Reagan years.

New Cinema cofounder Becky Johnston recently described this little-seen feature as “an East Village reinvention of the Otto Preminger movie *Laura*” that plays “fast and loose with the noir detective genre.”