Slamdance Virtual 2025 Field Report #1: Know Me: The Untold Story of the Miami Bath Salts Phenomenon
It’s a big year for Slamdance with its re-location to its new home of Los Angeles. The festival has finally decided that being Park City’s also-ran, shadow festival to Sundance was no longer in the best interest of its participating filmmakers. Perhaps there was no better time to have pulled the trigger on the move as there was much handwringing about how poorly Sundance fared this year as feature sales seemed way down. If the industry didn’t seem to care for independent cinema this year at its central institution you can only imagine that Slamdance would have been sidelined even further.
What hasn’t moved though is Slamdance Virtual, which has once again returned to my couch in the living room of my Toronto apartment as well as to living room couches around the world. There are eleven narrative features available to Canadian digital pass holders across the main narrative feature category of debut feature directors, the non-competition Breakouts category for directors who have previously directed a feature and the Unstoppable category for films by or about people with disabilities. I find eleven to be a sufficient enough number, there are years that thanks to Canadian rights issues less than ten films are made available here. So I am happy enough with these eleven for 2025. There are plenty of other documentaries, animations, shorts and other projects available to watch as well, but as I don’t care as much about writing about those you won’t see me cover them here (but I will be watching some of them for sure).
I am going to be making an effort this year to get through all eleven of the narrative features and make some best of the fest picks in about a week or so. Should give some people time to catch the best works before the digital festival winds down on March the 7th.
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Know Me: The Untold Story of the Miami Bath Salts Phenomenon
Dir: Edson Jean - USA - English/Haitian Creole - 73 Min
You might remember the 2011 incident in where a man was shot and killed by police on a Miami causeway after being found chewing off the eyes and face of a homeless man. The police’s speculation that the attacker was under the influence of a newly popular synthetic drug going by the name bath salts. The sensational nature of the story (and Florida’s reputation as a haven for strange behaviour) helped the story become a 5 o’clock news sensation around the world as people of all types took the story as more of an basis for humour rather than a tragic event that happened to real people. I remember this being a big story when it happened, leading the news coverage where I lived in Ottawa a full 2200 kilometers away.
Now, fourteen years later Edson Jean has a directed the feature Know Me: The Untold Story of the Miami Bath Salts Phenomenon, an attempt to depict the human side of the tragedy that was overshadowed by the media frenzy. Jean actually co-wrote the screenplay with Marckenson Charles. Charles is the real life brother of the attacker in the original real life event and Know Me was has its origins in his personal journal entries that he kept in the wake of the events. The film covers with week leading up to and after the attack as Charles’ stand in character Kenson (played by Edson Jean himself pulling double duty as actor/director) deals with the shock of losing a brother (Jimmy played by Donald Paul), steering the media’s dehumanizing narrative about his loved one, and attempting to find a community amongst many in their Haitian neighbourhood and faith communities abandon the family in an attempt to distance their reputations from what took place.
The film is undeniably authentic, capturing Kenson’s internal conflicts as his attempts to reconcile with his own feelings about what took place clashes with the public spotlight on him and his family. Having a familiarity with the original story only from the news reports that focused in on de-humanizing supposed nature of Jimmy’s zombie like nature during the attack, I will be the first to admit that I never thought about anyone involved in the news story as actual real people. Yes, obviously stupid of me, but I think I am far far from the only person guilty of this. Jean’s portrayal of Kenson’s wide breadth of emotions truly sells the complexity of what the character is going through. In the film’s curt 73 minute run time it has to be a film about both Kenson’s personal grief AND his struggles with the media and it pulls off all the intricacies competently. The film might benefited with a little more run time, especially involving the reporter character played here by Shein Mompremier. But what the film does spend it’s time depicting is pulled off with a solid competence. The film feels tremendously genuine in it’s authenticity, surely thanks to the involvement of the actual real life people of the story’s events. That alone makes the worth watching.
Jean is now, assuredly a directorial talent to be keeping an eye on for the future. Know Me is his second feature film but his mastery in how to use a camera to capture acting performances is far more introspective than a typical director of that skill level. There’s a stunning scene where, as a nurse, Kenson’s mother sneaks into the hospital room of her son’s victim and washes his wounds and bodies. Jean’s camera work and focus captures the tenderness of the tragedy completely without dialogue as he so perfectly know where to place his camera’s perspective for the sequence. Not to mention some pretty great use of flashbacks, here shot in noisy digital black and white to contrast with the rest of the film’s relatively warm tone. He does has room to grow still as a director, I do find a lot of the scene transitions abrupt and the overall rhythm of the film awkward at times. But what is actually on screen at all times is usually quite the accomplishment.
And I don’t want to delve to deep into it here as essentially no one reading this will have had a chance to see the film yet. But I will say Know Me has an absolutely perfect final shot. I can’t think of a film in the last couple years at least that has a final note that so expertly ties all of the film’s motifs and themes together at the absolute last second as the final shot here. A moment that is in and of itself makes the Know Me worth the watch.