ILOVERUSS

Some of you may recall the 3-projector exhibition of ILOVERUSS at Hypnos Theatre x Nordisk Panorama 2024. It was already at that time in the middle of the editing process that would result in the single-screen feature film ILOVERUSS, which premiered CPH:DOX 2025.

To install 3 projectors and accompanying screens in Hypnos Theatre meant we needed to remove all of but a small number of the cinema seats. It also meant we needed to put a hole in the wall to accommodate one of the projector’s throw distance. We also needed rip up and eventually replace all of the carpet. To say that ILOVERUSS took over Hypnos and my world for 2weeks, doesn’t quite capture the extent of it. – there was all of the preparation and the dismantling, even the sign for the exhibition still hangs outside of the door into the theatre.

but this is only interesting because of what the artist and director Tova Mozard did with ILOVERUSS. She found not only a profound friendship, but a screen-ready and uniquely compelling character in Russ – a long time resident of L.A. with a very, very long list of uncredited extra roles in television and movies – and then she centered him. The film largely depicts the daily life of a friendship through 20 years of raw and personal footage offering “the backside of the seductive movie city […] a world of diners, swimming pools and bungalows, portrayed with an artist’s eye for the sunny Californian surface – and for the twilight of the mind that over the years settles over her close friend.” (CPH:DOX) But more interestingly, what settles into the viewer, at least this viewer who spent weeks with it looping in the surround, is how unsettling it is that we can only live without comprehending that each and every “extra” lives a deep, profound life. Not everyone is as camera-ready as Russ, having spent decades thinking of himself in front of cameras, without it really ever capturing him, until now.