Gypsy Davy (film)

The film is narrated by the director, Rachel Leah Jones, as a letter to her father. Her father is "David Serva," who was born David Jones, in Berkeley, California. Described as a "white-boy with Alabama roots", he went on to become a well known flamenco guitarist- the first American to have a successful career in flamenco in Spain. Jones' mother, Judith Jones, was a "Brooklyn-born Jewish girl" who became a flamenco dancer. The two started a family in Berkeley, California, in the early 1970s.

Serva quickly abandoned his wife and baby daughter, and during his life and career, he amassed a total of five wives, and had children with each of them. Through her own memories and those of his other children and wives, in Gypsy Davy Jones creates a personal and political portrait of a man, and examines the legacy of an artist and his family.

Gypsy Davy was in the making for about a decade. Over this time, producer-director Rachel Leah Jones filmed her father, who had left her in infancy. She also interviewed her own mother, and her half-siblings and their mothers, combining these interviews with archival footage and her own narration.[1]

The film was created with support of the Israeli New Fund for Cinema and Television.[2]

The US premiere of the Gypsy Davy was at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.[3] The film had previously screened in Israel in 2011 at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

In his mostly-positive review, Screen Daily reviewer Tim Grierson writes that in spite of the main premise of a famous musician's infidelity being unsurprising, "director Rachel Leah Jones’s Gypsy Davy takes that truism and wrings something thought-provoking and melancholy from it." Though Grierson dislikes the narration, he praises the film's music and finds the family-member interviews to be the strongest point of the film.[4] In his Variety review, Dennis Harvey calls the film "as engrossing as a flavorsome, twisty literary novel", lauding both the "colorful characters" and the music.[5] Calling Gypsy Davy "an interesting story and great personal work", Jonas Weir, in Vox Magazine, sums the work up as "a portrait of a man who led an irresponsible life that hurt a lot of people and his daughter’s coming to terms with who he is. David Jones doesn’t seem like a completely rotten man, just a man who has done some completely rotten things."[6]

John DeFore, on the other hand, in the Hollywood Reporter, calls the film a "self-obsessed personal voyage" that is uninteresting to anyone not involved in the story.[7]

• Advocate
• Ashkenaz
• 500 Dunam on the Moon

• Gypsy Davy at IMDb
• "Meet the 2012 Sundance Filmmakers #18: Rachel Leah Jones", IndiWire, Jan 8, 2012
• "Documentary filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones on her film festival entry, ‘Gypsy Davy’", Sue McAllister, Mercury News, July 12, 2012