Phillip Lee Duncan

In his own words

Director’s biography

Written by Phillip Duncan in 2011

The basic facts are these: Phillip Duncan was born on November 4, 1967, in Salisbury, Maryland. His parents were Judy, a shy nineteen-year-old nursing student, and David, a twenty-three-year-old milkman soon to be shipped off to Vietnam. David returned safely, divorced Judy and maintained a lifelong estrangement from his only child. For Judy and Phillip, this established a pattern of mistrust, co-dependency and low self-esteem that dogged them for years.

There was a second marriage, an abusive alcoholic stepfather and ten different states, ten different schools. Phillip learned never to feel at home, especially at home. While hiding in his bedroom closet, he developed a taste for poetry, German literature and theatre.

There was no money for college and his talents had gone mostly unencouraged by the American educational system. Phillip joined the Army to see Germany for himself. The Army worked wonders on his confidence. He shed the morbid obesity he had carried through childhood—a second and portable bedroom closet of sorts—and began a relationship with a German woman.

He pretended he was crazy to leave the Army, moved back to Germany, lived with her for a year and eventually returned to America to live with his mother. He closed his bedroom door. There he stayed for the next twenty years.

One could look at the poems, paintings, stories, short films and songs made privately during this period as signs of life. In 2009, the fog suddenly and inexplicably lifted. With the aid of his longtime friend Daniel Scheimberg, Phillip left home and returned to Germany to film Love Songs for Scumbags, a feature intended to satirise and rewrite those twenty years through a fictional character’s return to Germany.

In May 2010 he went to New York to film As a Whistle, a short movie musical in which the singers and performers never leave the shower. And of course there was a screenplay about Heinrich von Kleist, a book of poetry and a gallery opening. Of course. Of course.