Floating on a skateboard through the wet streets of Seattle and Portland in the small hours of the night, Nick is like a prophet who denies the existence of the world. A high-school aged graffiti artist with no family or friends, Nick steals what he needs, sleeps where he becomes tired and wanders the city at night with no other idea than perfecting his tag, 'Rupture.' So when Nick meets another tagger and they start up a friendship, his hopes and des~ires are like the art he has left on back street buildings, abandoned railroad cars and lonely walls: beautiful, but hidden.
Working at the top of their professions, writer-director James Bolton and cinematographer Sarah Levy found their equal on the other side of the camera in the sensitive, storytelling eyes of newcomer Ruben Bansie-Snellman. Highly reminiscent of the classic Le Samourai, The Graffiti Artist evokes the city - and its nocturnal protagonist's place in it - with such hypnotic, Chandleresque grace that story and dialogue seem effortlessly to spring from setting. Simply put, The Graffiti Artist is cinema: a perfect fantasy world of people, pictures, movement, romance, possibility.
