Jeffrey Kunze has written up Suck’s participation in the LA Film Festival Fast Track program in Filmmaker Magazine. Here is the full text:

“Director Jon Reiss admits that “since my own trip down the punk rock road, I have been obsessed with how subcultures provide a way for people to find out who they truly are.” This obsession began when he was young and has continued to captivate him, most recently influencing his latest project, Suck, a story about a quiet girl who finds herself drawn to a wild musician and on a greater level, the growing punk rock scene of ’70s San Francisco.

“I grew up in the stultifying suburbs of what was to become Silicon Valley, ¬ thoroughly alienated from my peers and the world around me,” Reiss says. While attending college, studying anarchist economics, he began working for, Target Video, a famous San Francisco studio which churned out early punk and hardcore bands such as Black Flag, Crucifix and Flipper, which sparked Reiss’s fascination enough to start documenting the local punk scene. “The experience changed my life completely, stopping my predestined career in academia and turning me into a guerilla filmmaker par excellence.”

But it wasn’t until a few years ago when producer Ursula Holloman called him up out of the blue for research information on a script she was writing that Reiss finally had a creative outlet to focus his unique punk rock experiences into. “When Ursula told me the story, I knew that I had to be involved. It spoke of what punk rock meant for me and for so many of my friends at the time, a place to create a sense of family amongst misfits ¬and a place in which to transform as a person.”
Truly no stranger to counterculture, Reiss’s previous film was a feature length documentary entitled Bomb It that explored the worldwide popularity of graffiti and premiered recently at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. His other films include Better Living Through Circuitry, which explores the rave culture in a crazed yet amusing manner and Cleopatra’s Second Husband, a probing, psychological drama. In addition, Reiss has also directed numerous groundbreaking music videos, including “Happiness in Slavery” by Nine Inch Nails, which won awards at the Chicago and San Francisco film festivals and was voted Top Ten by the Village Voice Critic’s Poll for Best Music Video.
Jon Reiss: jon@brandsthatblossom.com, jonreiss.com