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A Forgotten Artist Finds Redemption in New HBO Doc

Talking to the director of "Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson".
Jane Anderson/ Photo Credit: Courtesy of HBO

The parallel lives of Jane Anderson and her great-aunt Edith Lake Wilkinson come center stage in Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson, a just-released HBO documentary from director by Michelle Boyaner. Once a celebrated artist, Wilkinson’s life and flourishing career were cut short when she was committed to an asylum in 1924. Wilkinson then slipped under a shroud of anonymity, with her art packed away in rusty trunks in the forgotten corners of her family’s attics.

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Generations later, Anderson spent her formative years surrounded by Wilkinson’s paintings and prints. She felt an indescribable kinship to the work and its maker. Part family drama, part cold case, the doc follows Anderson — now an award winning director and writer and also an executive producer and co-writer of the film itself — as she seeks redemption for her great-aunt’s tragedy. The film picks up the story at it’s narrative climax, at a break-through moment in Anderson’s 40-year odyssey to re-indoctrinate Wilkinson into the artistic movement in which she belongs.

“It’s really a story of redemption,” Boyaner tells The Creators Project. “It’s a story of this wrong being righted. And for Jane to carry the story of [Edith] with her for decades and then to be a part of finally uncovering everything and rewriting the end of Edith’s story—to have her completely seen and received and known is all redemption […] Which is why I could never make it a straight forward documentary about Jane’s great-aunt, which is what she came to us about. And I said, ‘What interests me is making a documentary telling the story of you trying to uncover that mystery and hopefully shake some trees and get a happy ending.’”

Boyaner’s a-typical story telling style feeds the film’s unadorned phenomenality. Many of the most crucial revelations happen —unscripted and unanticipated —in real time. “Lots of [breakthroughs] happen on camera because we shot the shit out of this thing,” Boyaner says. “It was definitely not about recreations; not about ‘lets pretend it happened on camera.’ We authentically wanted to capture everything and, in the best way we could, let everyone get lost in the story, rather than feel like they were watching a documentary.” An original score by Danielle Anderson aids this objective, punctuating the plot with her ukulele and soft croon.

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Tess Ayers and Jane Anderson/ Photo Credit: Courtesy of HBO

“We told Jane and Tess [Ayers, Anderson’s spouse and the movie’s co-producer] that they would get used to it and forget the cameras were there, because we want to always have the cameras running.” she continues. “If someone, for example, left them a message, we said, ‘Don’t listen to it, we’re coming over!’ […] A package arrives: ‘We want to be there when you open it.’” As a result, Anderson and Ayers’ emotions and reactions are real and raw at the film's critical junctures — from the revelation of Wilkinson’s probable homosexuality, and the passionate love affair that influenced so much of her work, to records of her travels throughout the U.S., on tour with her fellow artists.

All these narrative threads eventually lead to Anderson's return to Provincetown, Massachusetts — where Wilkinson thrived and where, decades earlier, Anderson reached a dead end in her great-aunt's saga. With her return, Anderson not only finds evidence of Wilkinson's preeminence in a specialized form of white-line wood printing— pioneered by Provincetown artists — but also expert evaluations, sympathy, and a gallery eager to exhibit Wilkinson's under-appreciated work. In short: the perfectly unscripted happy ending.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of HBO

Find out more about Packed in a Trunk on the film's website and watch the full documentary on HBO today.

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