Finding the man who walked away

Filmmaker documents her vanished uncle

A strip from Danny William's his ''Factory.'' (Courtesy of the Danny Williams Estate)

Unless you're familiar with the arcane details surrounding Andy Warhol and the characters who inhabited his world, you're not likely to be familiar with the name Danny Williams.

But Williams had a mysterious, chilling, and now rediscovered life story. And after winning the Teddy Queer Film Award at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and the New York State Loves Film Award at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, the film of that story, "A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory," gets its Boston premiere next weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Art, with two shows on Saturday and one on Sunday.

Williams was a Massachusetts native who attended Harvard before dropping out in 1965 and moving to New York. There he met Warhol, fell in love, and moved in with Warhol and Warhol's mother. Williams became a filmmaker and made 20 experimental silent films that featured Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and the Velvet Underground.

A year later, things fell apart. Warhol broke off the affair, and Williams returned to Massachusetts. One day he left his house and disappeared. He was 27. No one heard from him again.

Forward to 2000. Esther Robinson is director of film/video and performing arts for the Creative Capital Foundation, a funding organization for artists. The foundation is affiliated with the Warhol Foundation and shares office space with it on Bleecker Street in New York City. And Robinson is Williams's niece.

But she doesn't know much about this man. "My grandmother never spoke about my uncle Danny but she kept a separate shelf of books about the Warhol factory," Robinson has written. "If I cracked her copy of 'The Andy Warhol Diaries,' or 'Edie: American Girl,' it would fall open to a small picture of Danny, or the odd underlined sentence that included his name. As a child I was obsessed with these books, the short descriptions of Danny and this silence. Why weren't we allowed to ask certain things?"

She also wondered, as she got older and began to recognize some of the people in the photos, "How did some people become famous and others forgotten? Why were some stories told and not others?"

She found out that the Museum of Modern Art had possession of the 20 Williams movies, which had never been shown publicly. She pressed the museum to allow the family to see the work - she says that wasn't easy - and, eventually, to reacquire it.

Robinson had never made a movie before, but she became driven. It was a way to broach family secrets and find out who this relative was.

"A Walk into the Sea" plays on Saturday at 2 and 5 p.m., and Sept. 28 at 4 p.m. Robinson will be at the Sept. 28 show for a post-film Q&A.

Later next Sunday, at 7:30 p.m., the ICA will show three of Williams's never-before-seen movies: "The Factory Film," "The Velvet Underground Eat Lunch," and, accompanied by live music by T. Griffin of the Brooklyn band The Quavers and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, "Harold Stevenson Part 1 and Part 2."

For more information, call the ICA at 617-478-3103, or go to www.icaboston.org.

SAVE THE DATE: The Brattle Film Foundation is hosting its fifth annual silent auction of artworks on Sept. 28. This year's Art House event is taking place at the Longy School of Music Concert Hall in Harvard Square. Artwork for the fund-raiser has been donated by more than 60 artists from Greater Boston. Images of all work are online at the Brattle's website, www.brattlefilm.org.

CONVERSATIONS WITH: Avant-garde cinema expert P. Adams Sitney, author of the 1974 work "Visionary Film" and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, will present an "illustrated lecture" featuring short films and discussion tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive. Sitney's latest work is the 2008 "Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson," an investigation into the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetry on the mid-20th century American avant-garde (617-495-4700 and www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa). Local filmmakers Naomi Greenfield and Sara Taksler, whose production company Eliot Lives Productions is based in Somerville, bring their documentary "Twisted: A Balloonamentary" to the Museum of Fine Arts on Friday at 8:15 p.m. The movie is about the world of balloon twisters, many of whom have moved beyond your basic balloon dog to build creatures such as a 100-foot-tall soccer player and a Trojan horse. A ballooning demonstration and conversation with the directors follows. The movie also plays Oct. 12 at 2 p.m., with Greenfield and Taksler again in attendance. A trailer is online at www.twistedballoondoc.com (617-267-9300 and www.mfa.org/film).

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: "The Accidental Advocate," about surgeon Claude Gerstle's foray into the world of stem-cell politics after a bike accident paralyzed him, plays the Brattle Theatre tonight at 7, presented by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. And if thinking about the Williams/Warhol films has you nostalgic for the days of light shows and noisy music, mark this: "Boston Tea Party Light Show Films" from 1967 through 1969 directed by Ken Brown will be presented with live psychedelic music on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Brown made the movies when he was the resident filmmaker at a Berkeley Street rock club known as the Boston Tea Party. The musicians for the event are Willie Alexander - who performed on the opening night of the Boston Tea Party in 1967 - Chris Butler, Bob Moses, P. Andrew Willis, Ken Winokur, and DJ Pace (www.balaganfilms.com). Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com.