A film by Phillip Lee Duncan
Love Songs for Scumbags
A bruised, comic and unruly transatlantic family history—built from melodrama, performance art, musical fragments and the life Phillip Duncan imagined he might have lived.
The story
A film within a life within a film
Doug Blankenship, a reclusive American folk artist, comes to Berlin carrying a spiral notebook full of screenplays. The film he makes there concerns a neo-Nazi and his drug-addled wife fighting to regain custody of their child.
As that story unfolds, Doug slips towards homelessness and mental illness. Meanwhile, his twenty-year-old daughter Sophie arrives in Berlin looking for the father she has never known.
Phillip’s image world
Not a border. The main event.
These drawings framed the old site. Here they are allowed to occupy the page: dense, funny, wounded and inseparable from the film’s visual language.
“It is my intention and honour to see that his legacy takes shape and his voice be heard.”
Phillip Lee Duncan · 1967–2012
The work around the film
Phillip was a filmmaker, poet, painter, singer and performer. His surviving work reaches far beyond this feature: shorts, music videos, songs, poems and a large visual archive.
From the archive
Film, voices and images
Latest news
A new home for the film
The original site is being restored for phones and modern screens while the film’s next online release is prepared for early 2027.