Ink & Linda

About a year after a drunk driver demolished the front of her dance studio, Linda Lack discovers something. Between the insurance companies and the intransigence of the city authorities she is minded to give up on reopening her studio. There adorning the building's boarded up frontage is a piece of street art. A poster, screen printed on brown paper, of a line drawn refugee looking back, her two children and her bonsai tree on either end of a bamboo yoke. Invigorated, Linda goes about tracking down the artist: Inksap.

The documentary is structured in a fairly conventional way. After Linda comes across Inksap's work the narrative splits, focusing on each of the artists as individuals, highlighting the disparities between them. Inksap is a street artist in his twenties, the child of Vietnamese refugees who fled during the fall of Saigon. How his upbringing informs his art and his attitude towards it is examined. His family want him to have a respectable and safe job, like a doctor. Instead he spends his nights running around dodging cops and security guards. Linda, by contrast, is in her seventies. She came from an artistic family who actively supported her ambitions. Her whole life has been spent in dance, performance and movement therapy. She holds a doctorate and is respected in her field.

After the pair meet, Ink & Linda focuses on their growing friendship and then on their artistic collaboration. There are analogous elements between each's creative work, both in the way that Inksap's art captures movement and in the physicality of placing it in the urban environment (running, climbing, sneaking), with Linda's performance and dance. Creatively, the two approaches fit together surprisingly well.

The filmmaker, Stuart C Paul, a friend of Linda's, had the camera rolling from just after the discovery of the poster. He has captured a cross-generational friendship and cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration from its inception; its warmth and its vibrancy. Ink & Linda is an enjoyable and informative fly on the wall documentary about an unlikely and interesting relationship.