Lawrence Ferlinghetti

After botching the capture of a notorious serial killer, idiosyncratic detective Michael Burrows loses his job with the San Francisco Police. He becomes an investigator for an insurance company and joins forces with a cynical field agent to probe suspicious and unusual deaths.

A blending of documentary and experimental narrative strategies, combining stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voice-over to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as “suicide landmark,” and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery. The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional.

Color UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. An Animation Workshop film that visualizes the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "The World is a Beautiful Place" by melding collage and cel animation. Repurposing images from popular magazines, Frew juxtaposes photographs of the Holocaust genocide with the hyper-pop images of American culture, contextualized by the rising anti-Vietnam War and Student Protest movements of the late 1960s.