Danielle Lessovitz is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for Port Authority, a queer feature film that premiered at Cannes's Un Certain Regard in 2019. She typically casts non-actors in her films, and focuses on marginalized communities.
Lessovitz is part of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. She has said that she got into filmmaking as "a way to be honest about what was seeing and experiencing, wanted a way to make sense of very complex feelings and to communicate those as best could", comparing filmmaking to poetry and painting. Lessovitz's films typically depict marginalized communities and star non-actors. She directed her first short film, Batteries, in 2009, and followed this with the 2012 short The Earthquake, which won awards in Philadelphia and Kansas City, and Neon Heartache, a 2013 short that also played the festival circuit. She wrote The Earthquake in 2010 after reading about Haitian communities in Queens experiencing loss from afar after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, setting the film in Brooklyn; she won the Ben Lazeroff award for screenwriting for it. Her first film shown at Cannes Film Festival was 2017's Vladimir de Fontenay-directed Mobile Homes, which she co-executive produced and co-wrote. Eric Kohn for IndieWire said that for Mobile Homes, Lessovitz "burrows inside a persecuted world without pandering to it". In 2019, TheWrap included her in their list of the top 16 directors at CannesFilm Festival, which also featured names such as Pedro Almodóvar, Werner Herzog and Agnès Varda. Her film at the festival this year was Port Authority, her directorial debut feature film set in the New York ball subculture and telling the love story of a black trans woman and a homeless white man. It stars Fionn Whitehead and Leyna Bloom, who became the first black trans actress to star as lead in a film at the festival. The film was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who Lessovitz said she was scared to reveal the final product to, explaining that "to feel like you have one of the most if not the most important American auteurs opening up his wisdom and his mentorship to you is surreal". Taylor B. Hinds for I AM FILM wrote that Lessovitz "displaces the... white-male role to the outskirts of the queer culture" in the film, also forcing Whitehead's character Paul to rediscover his sexuality and masculinity while engulfed in the ball scene. Lessovitz has said that she knew of ball culture from having seen Paris Is Burning as a film student, but did not know that it was still around in the 2010s until she was invited to one while in a crisis after her father's suicide; watching people vogueing gave her "respite" in this time, and speaking to drag families helped her gain a fresh understanding of family structures. The character of Paul has several parallels with Lessovitz, but she explains that his male privilege is explored in the film, something she has never experienced, and that he is used to explore forms of masculinity from this perspective. The film also confronts Paul's identity as a white person, something that IndieWire's Jude Dry said Lessovitz "clearly gave a lot of thought"; interviewed by the outlet from Cannes, she said:
We need to have conversations, especially as white allies... How do we tell these stories that are important to us and relevant to us? How do we do it in a way that's consistent with the deeper humanity that runs through all of us? And we need to have a middle ground where we're not working in a space that's commercial or fetishistic and sort of wanting to exploit or profit off of the beautiful cultural contributions of a class of marginalized people.
Kohn said that Lessovitz's "ability to address the drama's specific hook in measured terms enables this scrappy little movie to strike a quietly progressive note".
