Artist Unknown

The lost tradition of the great New York indie wonder has returned in the knockout romance thriller Artist Unknown, the riveting feature debut written and directed by Cinder Chou.

Juniper (Kerry Lacy) spots a painting of a nude on the sidewalk outside a thrift store. She buys it for $15 and walks away with it. She is then accosted by two thieves wearing pantyhose masks who try to get her painting. Turns out the MMA jacket Juniper was wearing wasn’t just for show, as she proceeds to fight off the thieves with some skilled moves. She drops the bigger one, but the smaller thief gets her right in the face before sirens scare them off.

Juniper’s ex is crashing; Meg (Sam Jaikaran) sees her bruised face and wants to know if her last lover, Brian, did it. Juniper informs Meg that Brian isn’t even in New York anymore and tells her what happened. Meg, who runs the women’s MMA center where Juniper is working, wishes that Juniper would let her train her further on her fight game. Meg has a friend who is an art historian, Leslie (Daryl Lathon), who looks at the painting. Leslie says there is a chance it could be valuable, but it would need someone more expert than himself.

“…Penny asks Juniper out but then has to leave their chess-playing date in the park early.”

Artist Unknown then introduces us to the bespectacled Penny (Sonia Mena), who shows up for a self-defense lesson, which Meg has Juniper give as she has plans that night. Juniper teaches Penny some moves with some definite chemistry between the two. Afterwards, Penny asks Juniper out but then has to leave their chess-playing date in the park early. Penny makes it up to her with a home-cooked dinner and wine. Getting drunk, Juniper confesses that even though it was her first fight, she enjoyed fighting off her attackers. They start flirting hard, and Penny starts unbuttoning her shirt. At that moment, a strange man, Cedric (Walker Hare), walks through the door, and everything is suddenly blown to hell.

We used to see indie movies with the level of power Artist Unknown achieves regularly from New York, with Scorsese in the 1970s and Jarmusch in the ’80s. It was so New York then to hit the streets with a camera to carve a story out from the skin of the city. Then, as the ’90s hit and rents reached the stratosphere, the New York indie wonder was replaced by the My Little Golden indie movie.

With starving visionaries being priced out of Manhattan and later the outer boroughs, only the city’s idle rich were left to represent the renowned New York indie flick. Suddenly, these edgy works of art were replaced by 90-minute sitcoms without laughs. Characters would spend the movie walking and talking about dating, with no one working around the clock like most New Yorkers have to. As prices rose even higher in the new century, filming in New York became an expensive folly that was much more cost-effective to fake in Canada. As the once-great city priced itself into extinction, the fact that it once led the planet in indie cinema became a fading historical footnote—just like how Constantinople was once the greatest city on Earth and is now Istanbul, a second-tier wood alcohol poisoning hotspot.