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Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

Directing

Biography

Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli works as a film director, editor, colourist and critic living in New York. She has directed two feature films, So Pretty, (2019, Berlinale) a literary translation/transposition focusing on gender and the utopian imagination, and Empathy (2016, FID Marseille), a performative documentary following a heroin-addicted escort across the USA.

Known For

The Serpent's Skin
5.0

Two young women form a romantic bond after discovering they have supernatural powers. Their insecurities unknowingly release a demon, which possesses one of their exes and begins feeding on their friends. As the bodies pile up, it becomes up to the women to face their pasts and stop the growing evil.

The Serpent's Skin

2026
How to Find a Career That Loves You Back
N/A

Khloe and Joyce, two trans women who work for a defense-technology corporation, fall in love when they're sent to a college career fair together. Their fragile bond forces Khloe to choose between safety and the uncertain path of freedom.

How to Find a Career That Loves You Back

2025
Fuck Work
N/A

Identity and performance, resistance and submission, and monotony and quiet rage crash into one another in this clear-eyed vision of a lesbian working as a professional dominatrix with a police officer as a regular client.

Fuck Work

2015
Marriage Story
10.0

An auto-fiction under the eyes of a female Christ, a marriage as a step into the forbidden land of the holy, a lesbian poem in the language of the divine, a paean to the color red, the world's slowest rave.

Marriage Story

2020
Happy Birthday, Marsha!
2.7

It's a hot summer day in June, 1969. Marsha throws herself a birthday party and dreams of performing at a club in town, but no one shows up. Sylvia, Marsha’s best friend, distraught from an unsuccessful introduction between her lover and her family, gets so stoned she forgets about the party. Marsha, Sylvia, and friends eventually meet at the Stonewall Inn to celebrate Marsha's birth. When the police arrive to raid the bar, Marsha and Sylvia are among the first to fight back.

Happy Birthday, Marsha!

2018
In Sudden Darkness
5.0

A slice of life film set in the Bronx, New York—In Sudden Darkness follows the life of the Moores, a working-class family trying to stay afloat in the midst of a city-wide blackout.

In Sudden Darkness

2020
Remember Me
N/A

Claire just turned 40 years old, got dumped, and moved home to take care of her dying dad. She decides it’s time for her to go on a date.

Remember Me

2025
So Pretty
4.6

Four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel "So schön" by Ronald M. Schernikau.

So Pretty

2019
Life Story
N/A

Pairing an original text by philosopher McKenzie Wark (Hacker Manifesto, Raving) with slowly-strobing orange-hued images of her body and domestic life, framed by techno and the most stripped-down version of the rave’s aesthetics, this semi-documentary delicately merges the history of the left with the history of Wark's body as laid bare before the camera. We see the marks of her gender transition and her life story as she speaks of love and lost futures, even as both her own death and the death of the left hover just out of frame. A love story.

Life Story

2024
How to Have Sex in a Pandemic
10.0

The work of sex-positive HIV/AIDS activists in the 1980s inspires Queer New Yorkers to revive and reinvent safer sex practices during the early months of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

How to Have Sex in a Pandemic

2022
Empathy
2.0

Em is an escort girl and a heroin addict. From New York to Los Angeles via Pittsburgh, Em’s daily life is revealed.

Empathy

2016
Minseo
N/A

A young Korean American model juggles working in a restrictive fashion industry and hoping to be acknowledged for who they truly are.

Minseo

2024
No image
N/A

A three-minute ambient film set to original music by Rovinelli, this never-before-screened film filters a gay sexual encounter through a grid of flashing colors, and stars the noted rapper Kalifa / Le1f.

Untitled

2009
No image
N/A

In Rovinelli’s scuzzy thesis film, a young man has sex with an older man for money, adopts a cat, and rides a bicycle.

We've Loved You So Much

2010
White Grass
N/A

In Mongolia, Munkhjargal dreams of following in both her father's and her ancestors' footsteps as a horse trainer. Unfortunately, her entire way of life is threatened by a once rare but increasingly common phenomenon of extreme and unrelenting cold known as dzuds, which is forcing Mongolian herders to rethink their nomadic way of life.

White Grass

2023
3PM (Puma Automatic)
N/A

A black-and-white music video for Rovinelli’s band House Party, filled with bodies and goo.

3PM (Puma Automatic)

2014