The Death of Dottie Love

In the 1980s, three people were murdered in Bangor, Maine. One of them was Dottie Love, a prostitute who arrived in town and then vanished under circumstances that were never fully explained. Todd Verow, who would go on to become one of the defining voices of New Queer Cinema, made this seven-minute experimental short early in his career, weaving the three true stories into a fractured, hallucinatory collage of image and sound. The film is less a reconstruction than an act of remembrance, using a restless, flickering visual style to evoke how violence against outsiders in a small city gets absorbed and forgotten. Jen Gentile, Michelle Nash, and Susan Becker appear in the cast. Raw, brief, and unsettling, it is a glimpse of a filmmaker finding his voice by refusing to look away. Presented as part of Queer Quickies 106.