You Are Not I | LEFFEST - Lisboa Film Festival

In the 80s, this short film – an adaptation of a short story by Paul Bowles about a woman who escapes from an asylum – toured the international film festivals. After an accident that destroyed the negative film, a print was miraculously found in 2009, and the film has been restored and made available since then. It is one of the many collaborations between Sara Driver and Jim Jarmusch, who was the writer and director of photography of this short film.

Duration: 50
Production year: 1981
Country: United States of America

Sara Driver

Sara Driver is an independent director who was part of the creative wave in downtown Manhattan from the late 70’s to the 90’s. Driver rose in the cinema world when she produced two of Jim Jarmusch’s films, Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise, in which she also starred.

In 1981 she directed her first film, You Are Not I, based on a short story by Paul Bowles, which earned plenty of praise and was considered one of the best films of the 80s by the Cahiers du Cinéma. A fire in a warehouse destroyed the negatives and the film was thought to be lost for several years, but later a copy was found in Bowles’ archives.

She directed two other feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), which were screened and received awards at several film festivals. Albeit not extensive, her work has been praised by important film critics and it was screened at LEFFEST in 2015.