The Life of Sean DeLear
A blazingly colourful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles' underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear (1964-2017) suddenly emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979. I Could Not Believe It joyously chronicles the experiences of a young Black, queer creative finding their identity, voice and style decades before Barry Jenkins' (rather more downbeat) Moonlight.
The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.
There the former frontperson of Silver Lake postpunk-combo Glue reinvented themselves as a cabaret performer and collaborated with famed art-collective Gelitin before passing away aged just 52. "SeanDe" entrusted their treasure-trove audiovisual archive to Zizenbacher, who with co-editor Sebastian Schreiner has crafted an eclectic collage generously spiced with effervescent extracts from DeLear's own extensive video-diaries.
These jagged hand-held snapshots bring back to often-hilarious life the electric days (and especially nights) from a quarter of a century ago, placed in retrospective context by present-day testimony from the survivors who knew SeanDe best and loved them the most. Sean DeLear — as in "chandelier" — lit up their world; Markus Zizenbacher now illuminates Sean DeLear for ours. (Neil Young)
ADA Award Ethnocineca 2025: The Life of Sean DeLear (Award)
ADA Jury Statement
The Life of Sean DeLear by Markus Zizenbacher
The selected film portrays an unapologetic love letter to life in its strength and fragility, its presence and losses. It is a crafted portrait, not only a tribute to the iconic protagonist, but a vivid cinematic expression of friendship and the underground music scene of the '80s and the ‘90s. A film like its protagonist: authentic and fiercely alive. It is a time-traveling work of art, seamlessly weaving raw and intimate archival footage shot by the protagonist himself with contemporary footage and his own diaries. It bridges past and present and shows the beautiful brutality. At its heart is Sean DeLear, a radiant, magnetic presence
whose role in the band Glue, and in wider cultural spaces and beyond, served as a crossroads for identity, performance, and insistence through existence.
This film stands out for its bold artistic vision, emotional depth, and cultural urgency. The award of ADA Jury ethnocineca 2025 goes to The Life of Sean DeLear by Markus Zizenbacher, capturing not only a singular life, but an entire era and the echoes it continues to send through our world today.
Deutsch
Der ausgewählte Film ist ein unverblümter Liebesbrief an das Leben in seiner Stärke und Zerbrechlichkeit, in seiner Gegenwart und seinen Verlusten. Es ist ein kunstvolles Porträt, nicht nur eine Hommage an eine Ikone, sondern auch ein lebendiger filmischer Ausdruck von Freundschaft und der Underground-Musikszene der 80er und 90er Jahre. Ein Film wie seine Hauptfigur: authentisch und lebendig. Ein zeitreisendes Kunstwerk, das rohes und intimes Archivmaterial, die Sean DeLear selbst gedreht hat, nahtlos mit zeitgenössischen Aufnahmen und seinen eigenen Tagebüchern verwebt. Der Film schlägt eine Brücke zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart und zeigt die Schönheit in der Brutalität. Im Mittelpunkt steht Sean DeLear, eine strahlende, magnetische Präsenz, deren Rolle in der Band Glue und in weiteren kulturellen Räumen und darüber hinaus als Kreuzungspunkt für Identität, Performance und Beharrlichkeit im Leben diente.
Der Film zeichnet sich durch seine kühne künstlerische Vision, seine emotionale Tiefe und seine kulturelle Dringlichkeit aus.
Der Preis der ADA-Jury ethnocineca 2025 geht an The Life of Sean DeLear von Markus Zizenbacher, der nicht nur ein einzelnes Leben, sondern eine ganze Epoche und das Echo, das sie bis heute in unserer Welt hinterlässt, einfängt.
Jury: Pêdra Costa (performer, visual & urban anthropologist)
Sara Fattahi (filmmaker)
İpek Hamzaoğlu (artist & filmmaker)
The Life of Sean DeLear
2024
Austria
82 min