Chelsea Pictures has added multi-hyphenate directing duo Lalou & Joaquin to its roster for U.S. and U.K. representation spanning commercials and branded content.
Creative partners since 2006, Lalou Dammond and Joaquin Baca-Asay like to make stories that are humanistic, witty, uplifting, visually striking and technically inventive. They have directed award-winning campaigns for global brands with accolades at Cannes, Clios, AICP, Effies, Ciclope, ADDYs and The One Show. As a solo director back in 2010, Baca-Asay earned a DGA Award nomination for four commercial entries–CSX’s “Breathe,” Volvo’s “Switch,” Bank of America’s “Doors” and Lenscrafters’ “See What You Love.”
Lalou and Joaquin’s Rick Younger Presents The Rick Younger Show won best pilot at 2023 NY Webfest, and is one of four selections at the 2024 Harlem International Film Festival.
In a joint statement, Lalou and Joaquin shared, “We’ve long admired the group of exceptionally talented filmmakers at Chelsea, and love the richness and individualism of each of their corners of the artistic universe. Lisa [Mehling] and her team clearly have a curatorial take on their roster, and we’re honored to be a part of it.”
After graduating from Princeton, Lalou jumped straight into filmmaking as a producer of award-winning independent films and documentaries. Joaquin began his career as a cinematographer, gaining an Oscar nod for The Lady In Waiting which he shot while a student at NYU Film School. He went on to shoot notable music videos and feature films, including James Gray’s We Own the Night and Two Lovers, both of which premiered at Cannes; Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger, which won best narrative feature at Tribeca Film Festival; Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker, which won awards at Sundance and Berlin, and the cult comedy classic, Super Troopers.
Currently, Lalou and Joaquin are in postproduction on a feature documentary set in the world of British electronic music, and Lalou is directing a documentary about her great-uncle, the radical civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, that Joaquin is shooting. In their spare time they like to write and direct social justice PSAs, collaborate with other filmmakers on shorts, documentaries and television projects, and run their Craftwork Collaborative mentorship program for young creatives.
Chelsea owner and president Mehling said, “Lalou and Joaquin are true filmmakers and it’s an honor to have them join Chelsea. They are dogged in their drive to tell human stories and are collaborative to the core–they inspire us and we can’t wait to get to work.”
Prior to connecting with Chelsea, Lalou & Joaquin had been repped in the U.S. and U.K. by Biscuit Filmworks.
Review: Director John Crowley’s “We Live In Time”
It's not hard to spend a few hours watching Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield fall and be in love. In "We Live In Time," filmmaker John Crowley puts the audience up close and personal with this photogenic British couple through the highs and lows of a relationships in their 30s.
Everyone starts to think about the idea of time, and not having enough of it to do everything they want, at some point. But it seems to hit a lot of us very acutely in that tricky, lovely third decade. There's that cruel biological clock, of course, but also careers and homes and families getting older. Throw a cancer diagnosis in there and that timer gets ever more aggressive.
While we, and Tobias (Garfield) and Almut (Pugh), do indeed live in time, as we're constantly reminded in big and small ways — clocks and stopwatches are ever-present, literally and metaphorically — the movie hovers above it. The storytelling jumps back and forth through time like a scattershot memory as we piece together these lives that intersect in an elaborate, mystical and darkly comedic way: Almut runs into Tobias with her car. Their first chat is in a hospital hallway, with those glaring fluorescent lights and him bruised and cut all over. But he's so struck by this beautiful woman in front of him, he barely seems to care.
I suppose this could be considered a Lubitschian "meet-cute" even if it knowingly pushes the boundaries of our understanding of that romance trope. Before the hit, Tobias was in a hotel, attempting to sign divorce papers and his pens were out of ink and pencils kept breaking. In a fit of near-mania he leaves, wearing only his bathrobe, to go to a corner store and buy more. Walking back, he drops something in the street and bang: A new relationship is born. It's the... Read More