There’s this distribution company called Gravitas Ventures. They’re owned by Shout! Studios, but they just put out indie movies, mostly ones you’ve never heard of, both on VOD and on DVD-R. They’ve been around for almost 20 years and their biggest moment might be in 2021 when THE MOLE AGENT was nominated for the best documentary Oscar. That’s the Chilean documentary that inspired the Ted Danson show A Man on the Inside, which you can see on Netflix, not from Gravitas. And maybe you haven’t heard of that either.

Oh, they also put out DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS. And GRIZZLY II: THE REVENGE. I’ve seen those. And they did SLOTHERHOUSE. I’ve heard of that one.

Being released by Gravitas is not a mark of quality. Most of their stuff, honestly, I assume I wouldn’t like. (Could definitely be wrong.) But I appreciate their existence just because they’re putting movies onto physical media that otherwise would disappear, either by not being noticed or not being available. Some obscure movie that played at some obscure film festival, somebody worked hard on it, very few noticed, but Gravitas did, so there it is on a purple DVD, if you need it.

That includes this 2021 movie I never heard of called STREET PUNX. It caught my eye with the title (PUNKS with an X instead of a KS? who could have ever imagined!) and the mohawked man on the cover. It has to do with punks in Myanmar, so for a second I thought this was a really intriguing documentary, but actually it’s a narrative film about a filmmaker trying to make a narrative movie about that subject. Okay, I’d rather it be a documentary, but they must actually get to Myanmar and find some punks, right? Seemed worth investigating.

It begins in 2018 and seems like a found footage movie – shaky handheld footage with fake viewfinder graphics show Maja (writer/director Maja Holzinger) and friends in a cab in Myanmar “going to meet the punks.” They find the address they were given but it seems like the wrong place until they hear music in the distance and figure out that the punk show is happening beneath an overpass. The music is in Burmese but according to the subtitles it’s the band The Rebel Riot playing the song “Street Punx.” There’s a short montage of the band walking around and getting on a bus. They have enormous liberty spikes and elaborately spiked and studded jackets – the international uniform.

Then it’s 2019 and Maja is back home in New Orleans, feeling unfulfilled teaching an advanced filmmaking class at a charter school, in her spare time hanging out with pretentious installation artists and documentarians. She has video conversations/sex with Jojo (according to the subtitles, but the real guy’s name is Kyaw Kyaw), one of the punks she met on her trip, and tells people she’s working on a movie “about punks in Myanmar,” but it’s not a real plan until her weirdo friend Yamil (actual co-writer/producer Yamil Rodriguez) insists that he’ll produce it.

So unfortunately this a movie about failing to make a movie that I’d much rather be watching. They meet with various goofy characters (a rock star, a retired actress) trying to get someone with clout behind the project, running into dead ends and fights for creative control. I had no idea that the rock star guy is a real musician, Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. There are also some tangents like a trip to a strip club that seems very creative like the one in FLASHDANCE (one dancer has strings attached to her like a marionette and then she cuts them and she’s free).

Maja doesn’t have a script for her movie yet, and resists even having a story. “It’s not that nothing happens, it’s just that what’s not happening is more important than what happens,” she explains to a skeptical investor. She says it will be like Jim Jarmusch’s PERMANENT VACATION, and being Polish she also name drops Agniezka Holland and has a poster for Kieslowski’s BLEU above her bath tub. She pitches a movie about the contrast between the traditional culture in Yangon and the modernity of punks. We get to see actual footage of what she’s picturing and it is in fact beautiful, but most of the running time is focused on hacky parodies of movie industry or art scene people in the U.S.

It gets very meta when an investor wants to add a white tourist point-of-view character, and Yamil suggests making it a filmmaker based on Maja. She seems like the voice of integrity when she scoffs at that, but of course we’re watching the actual movie where she is the main character.

IMDb classifies STREET PUNX as a comedy, and that does seem to be the idea. Most of the characters and scenes are funny-coded. Yamil wears a different goofy wig in every scene, a camera crew awkwardly follows them around for the making-of featurette, there’s a terrible band, a star who’s into new age bullshit, her assistant who completely changes personalities when she leaves the room, a buffoonish movie star with bad opinions. What’s weird though is that the best performance is by Holzinger, who plays it entirely straight – not like the straight woman, but like she thinks it’s a dramatic movie while others think it’s a comedy. But obviously that’s not the case, since she’s the director!

It’s a pretty fearless and/or exhibitionistic performance – Maja is sexually frustrated and masturbates in the bathroom at work. Eventually she gives up on her collaborators and just goes to Myanmar herself, I think just to be there, not to film anything (except we’re watching great footage of her travels).

Then it says it’s 2023, she’s back home again, talking on Zoom again, but it’s one of the best scenes. Jojo smiles and talks about wanting to come to America, about the times they were together. “You remember when I touch you?” he asks. We only saw them together in montages, but we know it happened. He says he stayed in Myanmar because he feels useful for the revolution. He talks about the freedom of only doing what you believe in, and gives a deep, inspiring explanation of art as rebellion. “The politician, they control whatever they want, but they can’t control our creation. You know, they cannot control the punk rock.” It ends on this serious note and a series of title cards about the 2021 military coup and subsequent crimes against humanity. “Several locals who worked on the film have been forced to flee the country. Kyaw Kyaw and The Rebel Riot continue to perform and advocate for peace.” This does not feel like a comedy anymore. Very odd.

So I was pretty sure this was the deal: the real Holzinger really did want to make the movie about punks in Yangon, she shot some cool footage for it, but couldn’t go back there because of the coup, decided to use what she had in this movie about how hard it is to finish a movie. But I couldn’t find any support for that theory in the interviews I found with her discussing the movie under the better title STREET PUNX OF YANGON. There’s not a huge amount of information out there, though. All I found was that Holzinger really did teach film (at University of New Orleans) and is now a “Love & Dating Mentor” on Instagram. Probly pays better than Gravitas Ventures.

The Maja character in the movie mentions that she wants to make a narrative feature because there’s already a documentary on the topic. Sure enough, there’s a 2015 documentary about Kyaw Kyaw called MY BUDDHA IS PUNK. That’s what I should’ve watched. I did not think STREET PUNX was much of a movie, but it was worth a try, and at least it gave me some rabbit holes to go down. (To be continued?)