Year of the Spawn is an archival collage inspired by the synonymous song by the “gay church folk” band The Hidden Cameras. Wolf interpreted the song as an anthem for doomed youth. Having recently finished the historical film Teenage, Wolf collected over 100 hours of archival footage, featuring early 20th Century adolescents. Much of these historical newsreels feature bizarre and mysterious outtakes. These forgotten scraps became the fabric for this foreboding and melancholic music film.
Matt Wolf is a filmmaker in New York. His critically acclaimed and award-winning films have played widely in festivals and have been distributed internationally in theaters and on television. Matt’s feature documentaries include Wild Combination about the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, and Teenage about early youth culture and the birth of teenagers. His recent film Recorder is about the activist Marion Stokes, who secretly recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years. Matt’s newest film Spaceship Earth is about Biosphere 2, a controversial experiment where 8 people lived quarantined inside a replica of the planet.
Matt has made numerous short films, including Bayard & Me about the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who adopted his younger boyfriend in the early 1980s to obtain equal rights, and HBO’s It’s Me, Hilary about the Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight. Other shorts include, I Remember about the artist Joe Brainard, and The Face of AIDS for Time Magazine about a notorious 1992 Benetton advertisement.
In addition to filmmaking, Matt organizes film screenings and public events, and he was the Co-Curator of Film for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.