The Memories of Leopold Bray

This black and white homage to the European New Wave has no dialogue but features an extensive voiceover throughout and a piercing violin soundtrack. The film documents one summer in the life of an enigmatic young boy (the eponymous Leopold): his mysterious and uneventful forest journeys, his ambivalent relationship with a teenage crush; his frustrating encounters with the pedestrian citizens of his small town. This is the only completed film by writer-director Simon Sollis, who manages to transform the Pacific Northwest from a place of contemplative beauty in one scene to a Baroque nightmare in the next. Sollis used a number of child actors to portray Leopold as filming took more than three years. Leopold Bray entered the festival circuit in 1981. Sollis continued to write rambunctious essays about film (never collected) through the late 1980s. He worked briefly as an English Professor at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon.