A film by Phillip Lee Duncan
Love Songs for Scumbags
An ex-American G.I. returns to Germany after twenty years to make a film. He winds up homeless on the streets of Berlin, where his past and a family he never knew begin to surface.
Featured video
Winter was a bug
Ribeye · Waiting for Alan Lomax
The story
Twenty years later, Berlin
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
The 52 colors found in a shadow
Phillip’s pieces once crowded the edges of the original site. Seen up close, they form a suspect atlas of faces, creatures and impossible anatomy—comic, feverish and unmistakably his.
“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.