When I opened the paper this morning and read about a Joanne Levy who committed suicide I thought was that it was someone else, because the description said she had red hair and was 5'8. Except that obviously every other descriptive matched up: 23, second year film student, resident of Greenwich Village... Knowing Joanne to be impulsive and rather erratic, her intensity was always translated into her amazing films and this is so very tragic.

Joanne Levy was the very first person I met at Brown. I had just gotten to school and my dad dropped me off at the employment office so I could get an on-campus job (he had priorities). She was sitting at the job computer with Lili and we started up a conversation. I was always sort of bummed that they were in another unit, because I only met a couple other people I felt like I related to as much over the course of the next year. I hung out with them a lot during orientation week. I was absolutely miserable with Brown and thought I had made a huge mistake, but them, and Mike, Meghan, Albert and Lisa, who were all good friends immediately, made me think differently.

Last summer, Joanne and Lili came to the brownstone I was house-sitting in Brooklyn Heights and they stayed over a couple nights, post-juvenile slumber party style. Joanne had just gotten the list of films she had to watch over the summer before starting film school, and we watched Band of Outsiders, which is now one of my favorite movies, and something else I can't remember. She was always something of an intense presence -- on that day she had just returned from Providence, where she had accidentally set fire to her apartment and her cat had died of smoke inhalation. She had to go home early because she wasn't feeling well. (She had diabetes and didn't always take the best care of herself it seemed).

My friend Brandon, who was good friends with her and made a movie with her in intro to video (the one with the button for those who saw it) said it was always hard to know how she was actually feeling about things because she only let you get so close, and I feel the same way. Not that I was her best friend or anything (I haven't seen her since that time last summer), but I had no idea she was in such a situation. I got the sense that she was very close with her family, even if the press says she was in an argument with her father immediately before her death.

It's very sad, she was very talented, extremely hardworking and a total character, which are the three characteristics of a person I am generally drawn to. She was someone of greater potential than most, and if her death serves a purpose it should be to remind each of us of her focus, her drive and her talent, because she was someone who truly lived for her art. I was genuinely looking forward, even if our Brown-based friendship had lapsed, to see her succeed as a filmmaker.