A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory

Nadia visits her granddaughter at work – at the Warhol Foundation – and tells her that her son, who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, had been Andy’s lover and had lived with him. From that moment on the two family histories become a projection surface: that of an “upright and traditional” American family and the most legendary of all art families: Warhol’s Factory.
With the support of Callie Angell, the curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum, Esther B. Robinson, the niece of the vanished Danny Williams, tracks down a box of 16mm film material at MoMA that has his name written on it. A treasure chest opens up: images, never seen before, of the factory, of The Velvet Underground, well-known faces, all in a fusion of intimacy and splendor. Like a detective, Robinson searches for traces. Talking with contemporaries and family members, watching the films, and researching, one thing becomes clear: writing family histories is an amorphous conglomeration of memories, existing images, and the distance created by time – no different than writing film history. Still, despite the impossibility of grasping the truth, the film carves out an artistic biography as singular as it is puzzling. –Berlinale