When writing and directing this film, I wanted to be as honest as I could, pulling from parts of my life where I had a lot of frustration around being an artist and desiring a different kind of breakthrough… You can’t create this work alone, you need collaborators… Go where the love is… Cultivate the relationships of people who already love you because when shit goes down, that’s who’s going to have your back. — Radha Blank
THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION—written, directed, and performed by Blank—is an incisive look at relevancy, grief, and New York’s off-Broadway theater world and one of the funniest films of the year. Created before the reckoning of the Summer of 2020, the film captures, with penetrating wit and explosive humor, some of the conditions subsequently outlined in the open letter published by We See You, White American Theater.
Also starring Oswin Benjamin, Peter Kim, Imani Lewis, Haskiri Velazquez, Antonio Ortiz, T. J. Atoms, and Reed Birney, THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD-VERSION is streaming now on Netflix.
Netflix
Written and directed by Radha Blank.
Now streaming.
Radha Blank, The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020), from top: Radha Blank; Oswin Benjamin (foreground center) and Blank; Peter Kim; Blank; Reed Birney and Blank; Blank on set in New York City. Photographs by Jeong Park, courtesy and © Netflix.
