"Leave the Bus" Director Andrew Hevia Joins His Film at the Tropic

Interview by Shirrel Rhoades

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Filmmaker Andrew Hevia is coming to Tropic Cinema this Sunday with a documentary that’s oddly titled “Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window.” It’s a film about making a film.

You will want to be there for the Q&A to ask him how he wound up adrift in Hong Kong, a stranger in a strange land, trying to figure out how to make the film about an international art fair, a project that he’d been given a Fulbright grant to do.

You’ll be reminded of the same vibe of disorientation and loneliness found in “Lost in Translation,” a movie where “nothing happens at all.”

But then again, maybe there is a lot going on. Internally.

Hevia set out to chronicle the 2016 Art Basel in Hong Kong. Art Basel is a privately owned, for-profit international art fair staged annually in Basel, Switzerland; Miami Beach, Florida; and Hong Kong.

Having been involved in the Miami art scene (“It was a community of artists I’d gone to school with”), he thought he’d find the same interaction at Art Basel in Hong Kong. But instead he was experiencing a detachment that may have more to do with his personal life than chasing an elusive film project.

Hevia was sure there was a story here, liked the one he’d told with a short 2012 film about the art community in Miami titled “Rising Tide: A Story of Miami Artists.”

He just couldn’t find it. “I realized I did not have an understanding of the art community in Hong Kong,” he admits ruefully. “My very naïve idea is that I could make a film about the artists and about their struggles dealing with and around and succeeding next to the spotlight of this international art fair. But when I got there what became very clear to me is that the conversation in Hong Kong was about something else entirely. Now the conversation was much more about what will Hong Kong look like in the next thirty years.”

He realized he couldn’t be the removed documentarian who speaks with authority. “I don’t have that authority,” he concluded.

So he turned to semi-fictionalized storytelling based on his surroundings. “The bumbling filmmaker was definitely a choice,” he says. “I can say things I’d never say about a person I’m interviewing, things that are deeply embarrassing.” A personal viewpoint.

Hevia shot the entire documentary as POV with a handheld camera. No crew, no sound engineers, no gofers. Just him alone in a city of 7.4 million people.

We tag along like an unseen ghost while he wanders from exhibit to exhibit at Art Basel, a storyteller in search of a story. He meets a wealthy art collector in search of the next big thing. He encounters a shy artist who has the makings of a social climber. He chases an artist named Hugo for an interview, but it never happens. He gets invited to a show by an artist. He finds his way into a party where he knows no one.

Public spaces tend to be elevated in Hong Kong. At a rooftop gathering he hooks up with an artist friend from Miami, who agrees to meet him for drinks at a bar down the street, and then – completely unexpectedly – steps off the building’s ledge in heart-stopping piece of performance art. “It was terrifying,” recalls Hevia. “An unbelievable lightness of being, a vertigo. I’m not fearful of heights, but this took my breath away.”

Hevia attempts to do that with this experimental film, what Film Threat described as “a piece of art within an art film.”

Yet, all the while we are given glimpses into his inner angst, glimpses of his past, his relationships, a favorite dog, a pretty young woman on a swing.

“You’re here to make a movie,” the computer-generated voiceover robotically reminds him. Then the voice counters with doubts, “Why did you think this was a good idea?”

Tromping along the nighttime neon landscape with Hevia, we listen as he bemoans a recent breakup and other failed amorous adventures, flirts with a Ukraine girl, thinks more about the young woman on the screen.

The time spent making the film dragged on. It took him several months to find housing and research the art scene by going to exhibits and parties. Then he spent another ten months in Hong Kong, editing and revamping and finding the voice of his film. He’d met up with co-producer Carlos David Rivera, who told him, “I love what you’re trying to do, but there’s a better movie here.”

They found it.

“The process of the edit was about getting the movie to a place where it could be more personal,” says Hevia.

“Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window” is showing at the Tropic as a part of the Southern Circuit Film Festival, a program designed to bring new films from independent filmmakers to cinemas throughout the South – and provide directors and producers to audience for discussions in conjunction with each screening.

In Miami Andrew Hevia had enjoyed a two-bedroom apartment, but moving to New York after the breakup with a girlfriend, he downsized to a studio. Now, here in Hong Kong, he’d rented a place “the size of a steamer trunk.” The 40-square-foot cubicle in Sai Ying Pun barely had room for a bed.

“Now things are different,” said Andrew Hevia, in a phone conversation with the Key West Citizen from his large apartment in Los Angeles. He now works for Hollywood production, a company. And he was a co-producer on the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight.” While he has a bigger office across town, his closet-like home office with a wall-mounted desk is about the size that entire apartment in Hong Kong.

And – oh yes! – he’s happily married now. As it turns out, to that young woman on the swing.

As for “Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window” – a sign he kept seeing on the public transportation that ferried him around Hong Kong – it has been called “A mysterious, tragicomic documentary within a documentary,” poignant,” and “part travelogue, part essay film, and, in one surprising moment, part karaoke musical.”

Andrew Hevia calls it “a little bit of creative non-fiction. There’s a memoir aspect to it. The mystery of the art is half the experience.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com