2019 Wisconsin's Own Films: Eat at Joe's.

Eat at Joe's. by Benjamin A. Eisner
Cedarburg, WI (Milwaukee Premiere)

Running Time: 12 minutes
Screening Time: Friday, Sept 6th 6:45pm
Horror 

When secret society pickup artists, Hollywood and Broadway, descend upon a Wisconsin Honky Tonk bar, Christine and Jenny conceal conjuring tricks of their own.

Website

Press

Director's Bio:

While Benjamin is an established commercial director who got his start in Nashville directing music videos, pilots, and documentary projects for Capitol Records, Warner Brothers, Sony, and EMI Music Group, Eisner sees his self-employed day job as a means to an ultimate end: telling discourse-disrupting stories via cinema that reframe time-worn social, racial, and gender norms that prevent us from waking up to our present unity. With the aspiration to become a more empathetic director and subtextual screenwriter, Ben gained Sanford Meisner acting training at an accredited Meisner conservatory in Chicago in 2018. With Jewish grandparents who survived Hitler’s Holocaust, Eisner was offered EU citizenship from Germany; a deeply healing experience for Ben, whose ultimate inspiration to never quit comes from his irrepressible grandmother, Hildegard Eisner - aka “Omi”.

Director's Statement:

Male accountability and ethics in this still–fledgling 21st century is/are greatly what inspired me to make "Eat at Joe's.". It's an overarching social commentary running parallel with female empowerment; 'flipping the script' & analyzing time-worn social norms, as the mystery of the title alludes: evocative of a very baseline American landscape.

In Mythology / Picture language, women have often represented the totality of what can be known. It is time we raze tired baseline tropes that have gone unchallenged for far too long in our modern world — an often confounding and unjust contemporary existence.