Jose Muniain’s “An Independent Portrait” is a small masterpiece of intersubjective creativity and genius. He films a painter who is painting the portrait of a filmmaker, Robert M. Young whose films gave human faces to people whose stories tell alternative tales about human existence. It may sound like vertigo but the film’s images, dialogue, pacing and energy makes at least one fact about art and humanity clear-our creativity really depends on interdependent communication at many levels of the eye, the brain and the heart.

David Carrasco Harvard University