A GoFundMe has been started to support the medical expenses of Tarnation director Jonathan Cauete

Jonathan Kaue, the director whose breakthrough experimental personal paper Defamation (2004) proved both hugely influential but never quite matched in terms of formal inventiveness and emotional intensity, faced significant health challenges, and friends and supporters started a GoFundMe to help. Marie Therese Guirgis, Stephen Winter, Brian Kates, John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant are behind the fundraiser, which is currently just over halfway to its $60,000 goal. The treatment is taking place overseas and the funds raised will go to “important surgeries and medical care, his unpaid medical bills and living expenses while he goes through this long and delicate process of recovery in another country.” “We want Jonathan to be healthy and able to be out in the world, enjoying the company of his many friends, working to support himself, and sharing his unique and beautiful vision with all of us for many years to come,” they wrote. the organizers.

Made for under $300 by Caouette using iMovie, Defamation led to a kind of also unusual companion film, Go Renee (2012), which depicts the director moving his mentally ill mother from Houston to a new facility in New York.

For more information, including updates from Caouette, written from Bogotá, and to donate if you can, visit the GoFundMe page.