Harmony Korine

His father was a tapdancer and produced documentaries for PBS in the 1970s about an "array of colorful Southern characters"; he would take Korine to carnivals and circuses and taught him how to use a Bolex camera.

As a child, Korine watched movies with his father, who rented Buster Keaton films for Korine and took him to see Werner Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) in the theater.

Korine reminisced that "I knew there was a poetry in cinema that I had never seen before that was so powerful."

Korine spent his early childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area living with his family on a commune.

Harmony Korine (born January 4, 1973) is an American filmmaker, actor, photographer, artist, and author.

His methods feature an erratic, loose and transgressive aesthetic, exploring Taboo themes and incorporating experimental techniques, and works with art, music, fashion and advertising.

In the early 1980s, they relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended Hillsboro High School before moving to New York City to live with his grandmother.

As a teenager, Korine spent his summers in San Francisco, "skateboarding, living on rooftops, running away from my parents, getting in fights. You know, girls. At that point I was just getting into movies, but the idea of making films happened later in high school."

He began frequenting revival theaters, watching films by John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alan Clarke.

In an interview with Bruce LaBruce, Korine briefly mentioned that he studied Business Administration in college.

Other sources state that he studied Dramatic Writing at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for one semester before dropping out to pursue a career as a professional skateboarder.

Korine was skating with friends in Washington Square Park when he met photographer Larry Clark.

Impressed, the photographer asked him to compose a script about skaters and to include in the plot a teenage AIDS experience.

Korine told Clark, "I've been waiting all my life to write this story."

Within three weeks, Korine wrote Kids, a film about 24 hours in the sex- and drug-filled lives of several Manhattan teenagers in New York City during the AIDS crisis.

He is known for his films Kids (1995) and Gummo (1997) which explore unconventional narratives and themes of dysfunctional families, as well as Mister Lonely (2007), Spring Breakers (2012) and The Beach Bum (2019).

Korine was born to a Jewish family in Bolinas, California, the son of Eve and Sol Korine.

His father was an Iranian Jewish immigrant.

Kids received mixed reviews at the time of its release in 1995, but has since become a significant cult film.

Among others, the film features Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson in their first movie roles.

The film, while controversial, jumpstarted Korine's career.

This put him into contact with film producer Cary Woods who budgeted about $1 million to produce Gummo, Korine's personal vision.

In 1997, Korine wrote and directed Gummo, a film based on life in Xenia, Ohio, a town devastated by a tornado in the early 1970s.

Forgoing conventional narrative, Gummo is a nonlinear, fragmented series of sketches written by Korine.

Only five experienced actors worked on the movie; much of the cast was found during preproduction in Tennessee.

The film is notable for having unsettling, often bizarre scenes, as well as its dreamlike soundtrack, which strengthens the disconcerting atmosphere.

It features "an eclectic soundtrack including death metal, Madonna and Roy Orbison.

It premiered at the 24th Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 1997.

During the screening, numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.

Three months later, Werner Herzog called Korine to give praise to the film overall, especially the bacon taped to the wall during the bathtub scene.

He told The New York Times, "When I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair. [Korine's] a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position. It's not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?"

Although a majority of mainstream critics derided it as an unintelligible mess, it won top prizes at that year's Venice Film Festival and earned Korine the respect of noted filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, among others.

It has been called "unlike anything you've seen in a while – maybe ever" – and that "if you're the kind of person who claims to be frustrated by the predictability of commercial filmmaking, [it presents] a rare opportunity to put your money where your mouth is."

In 1998, Korine released The Diary of Anne Frank Pt II, a 40-minute three-screen collage featuring a boy burying his dog, kids in satanic dress vomiting on a Bible, and a man in black-face dancing and singing "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean".

It utilizes some of the same actors and themes as Gummo, and can be considered a companion piece as the film utilises footage that didn't make the final cut of Gummo.

The film "further disgusted critics" and solidified his status as a notoriously shocking and experimental director.

Julien Donkey-Boy, released in 1999, included a signed Dogme 95 manifesto.

While it broke a number of the movement's basic tenets, Lars Von Trier lauded Korine's ability to interpret the rules creatively.

The story is told from the perspective of a young man suffering from untreated schizophrenia, played by Ewen Bremner, as he tries to understand his deteriorating world.

Julien's abusive and arguably hypersensitive father is played by Werner Herzog.