9 to 5

Kevin Everson is a highly acclaimed filmmaker, and he’s got the frequent flier miles to prove it. Over the last several years alone, the Ohio native and U.Va. filmmaking associate professor has followed his films to top festivals around the globe. He has been to Sundance, the literal and figurative mountaintop of
the independent film world, a remarkable five times.

“It makes your year,” says Everson. “I think it’s the only film festival in the country where you can be labeled. You can be like, ‘This guy is a Sundance filmmaker.’ It has that kind of sexy label.”

Good thing, too, because without it, labeling Kevin Everson would be virtually impossible. Everson comes from a fine arts background and is a sculptor and painter as well as an accomplished photographer. The multi-threat talent portfolio allows Everson a measure of comfort not felt by all artists. “I figure I can always make art, no matter what the situation is.”

These days the situation is that Everson is in higher and higher demand for his onscreen creations. His film “Cinnamon,” which earned him his latest Sundance trip, has consistently decorated his passport throughout the past year, with trips to the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival and festivals in Marseilles, Munich, Wiesbaden, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Balfours, Australia.

The film is the story of an African-American drag-racing family. But more than that, it is about what most of Everson’s films are about: work. “I wanted to make a film about a mechanic and a bank teller. My dad’s a mechanic and my mom was a bank teller, so I grew up in that environment. My films are about working-class black American culture. It’s like, the labor is relentless. You are what you do. It’s on your mind all the time.”

Everson’s multi-faceted artistic life has one important constant — teaching. He is a valued mentor to his students, as much for his varied arts background as for his filmmaking knowledge and experience.

“Kevin is one of the most dedicated professors at U.Va.,” says Han West (Media Studies, English ’07), who is in his third year of studying with Everson. “He understands the medium backwards and forwards and always points out the subtle things that are what makes the movie the movie or what makes the theme the theme.

“With Kevin, and this sounds cliché, but the world is literally our classroom,” West says. “He takes students to New York each year to look at film and art, and he is always around for us. He will drop in when we are shooting our stuff, even if it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and we are shooting at somebody’s house. There are really no bounds to how he acts as a teacher, a mentor and a friend to a lot of us.”

Next up for Everson is a commission from the Rotterdam Film Festival to make a five-minute short as part of a program honoring filmmaker Gus Van Sant. Then comes his next feature, “Rhino,” with a premise that is entirely Eversonian. It focuses on the one black member of Italy’s Medici family … and the secretary from a 1970s detective TV series. “I was doing some research on Alexander di Medici when I was in Rome, so I thought that would be a nice time to do this thing. And also I wanted to do something about Gail Fisher, who played the secretary in the show ‘Mannix.’ So I figured I could just put them together.”

Everson was there as a recipient of the Rome Prize, which enables artists and scholars to pursue in-depth projects at the American Academy in Rome.

The film will use the form of a “Mannix” episode to research a family murder and will combine file and original footage. “Alexander di Medici’s mother was an African slave or servant, basically someone who works for a white authority figure. Gail Fisher played this kind of fictional matriarch and has this weird defense mechanism when it comes to her boss.”

While the film is “based on some true things,” Everson says, “it’s all just form. It’s all about the gestures of politicking and the gestures of performing, of acting.” He adds that “Rhino” has already earned strong interest from programmers on the major festival circuit. “Some people are saying, ‘We’ll take it; just get it done.’ Now I have to get it done by the end of July.” The film will be shot in Italy with Italian actors.