Adolph as a Grocer

314 Main street,Houston TX 77002

04 March, 2022

Description

"Adolph as a Grocer" begins in the early 1960s between a 40-year-old eccentric Jewish businessman and an 11-year old (also his co-worker). "Adolph as a Grocer" is a documentary which centers the relationship between Lawrence Story, a young African American boy and Adolph Davis, a Jewish business owner who hires the child to work part time at a small grocery store in downtown Houston in the early 1960s and becomes the child's first mentor, as well as a kind of surrogate father to a child raised by a single mother. The film is directed by Davis's grandson, gay filmmaker Jonathan Caouette, who seeks to uncover the impact his late grandfather had on the community by speaking to one of the few people still alive to document this important, as-yet untold, history of his family. "Adolph as a Grocer" is a film that intends to explore history's many multiplicities, by uncovering not only the stories of a family and the lives it touched through a family-run business, but also extending outward to include larger questions of history as it pertains to social and cultural movements occurring at the time, such as the Civil Rights Movement and segregation, inevitably integral aspects of the life of this store and those that operated within it, and Houston's manifestation of impermanence due to its resistance to preservation in favor of big business and commerce. The film offers a dreamlike existential meditation of impermanence when due to various factors, Houston remains in a recurring state of erasure and ruin. This film will be an experimental, multi-narrative, documentary hybrid, combining narration, interviews, found footage, and sound design. As with much of Caouette's work, it will combine jagged yet harmonious compositions with neo-realist mise en scène while incorporating elements from cinéma vérité to create a dreamlike soundscape.