SLAMDANCE 2023 Interviews: CISCO KID director Emily Kaye Allen

CISCO KID (Emily Kaye Allen)

The film’s synopsis: Emily Kaye Allen’s Cisco Kid follows Eileen (they/them)–a young queer dreamer who moves to a desert ghost town in Southern Utah, determined to live an independent and untethered life. Filmed across unfolding seasons, we experience Eileen’s journey as they forge a path among the discarded remnants of Cisco, Utah. Surrounded by the artifacts and memories of residents past, Eileen rebuilds ramshackle structures and creates a home of their own, often with a dog as their only company for months on end. Cisco Kid is a portrait of a singular spirit who defiantly walks away from mainstream society and resurrects a place that has been left behind by a changing world.

My personal thoughts: The full disclosure admission is that this is another film that I am currently working with as their publicist, so naturally I think it’s wonderful. This might be an odd way to compliment a documentary, but when I watched CISCO KID the first time, I kept thinking of Altman films or Malick films, because the combination of an independent, enigmatic character at the center of a story set with in a truly significant landscape is what I so often associate with that cinema when I hear those names. Allen and her camera become trusted companions to a charismatic, yet fiercely independent personality who hearkens back to a different time in their pursuit of restoring structure and life to a literal ghost town in the desert.