EXCLUSIVE: Picturehouse will be releasing the Ari Gold-directed one-shot musical Brother Verses Brother for awards consideration this season.
The movie, touted as a heartbreaking family odyssey through the streets of San Francisco, is executive produced by five-time Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola, and is inspired by Coppola’s concept of “live cinema.”
Brother Verses Brother follows twin musicians Ari and Ethan Gold as they hunt San Francisco for love, a gig and their dying poet father. As they move from Kerouac Alley through the cafés of the Beats and into the night, they try to finish a new song to play for their father, until Ethan reworks it for the separation that they know is coming. The story, conceived by Ari Gold, is improvised by the director’s own family and friends — including his real father – and Ethan Gold’s songs are performed live on camera as the night unfolds.
The song “Brothers Keep Goin’ Anyway” from Ethan Gold has been submitted for Oscar consideration in the Best Original Song category. You can listen to it above.
“Ari and Ethan have created a completely original film with music that fills your heart and makes you long for San Francisco,” says Bob Berney, CEO of Picturehouse. “We will jump into the awards season immediately with special event screenings and performances and will open the film theatrically early next year.”
“I wanted to make a film about the difficulty of ungluing ourselves from people we love, so an improvisation without cuts was the way,” said Ari Gold. “Our dad agreed to act at age 99, and we discovered that his presence inspires people to bring their own families to the cinema. Bob Berney has spent his career bringing personal films to big audiences, and I can’t think of a better home for our story.”
“I initially wrote ‘Brothers Keep Goin’ Anyway’ in Brother Verses Brother as a ballad for lonely men who don’t know how to love women. It’s for my father and his brothers, and for my brother and myself, about relationships which nurture and curse us. In the film I want my brother Ari to sing it with me to our Dad, but Ari never rehearses, so I change the words and sing it alone as an anthem of freedom for us both, to honor and love each other while breaking our toxic bond,” said Ethan Gold.
Brother Verses Brother also stars Lara Louise, Brian Bell of Weezer, former San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, and literary icon Herbert Gold, who at age 99 is in his first and final screen role. One of the last of the Beats, Herbert Gold died eight weeks after filming. The film is produced by Michelle Stratton, Starr Sutherland, Ari Gold and Scott Feinstein, with Coppola as executive producer. It is a Grack Films production in association with Atypical Project.