Lily Topples the World
What is it like to be in a room where one young woman is spending hundreds of hours building domino art? “Very, very, very tense,” Jeremy Workman says, referring to the setting of his new SXSW-selected documentary,
Lily Topples the World.
The film follows the life and art of Lily Hevesh, AKA Hevesh5, a YouTube star from the suburbs of New England. You’ve probably seen her videos before: thousands of dominos arranged with military precision, toppling by the thousands in mandalic spirals and Rube Goldberg-esque sequences.
Hevesh, a mostly reserved and college student, operates the most subscribed and watched domino art YouTube channel. She runs in a cohort of dedicated, young, mostly male domino artists. She’s been making videos since she was a child. Workman, who shoots, directs, and edits all of his films, narrows his focus not just on Hevesh’s ingenious structures but on how she carefully moves among her work and the long, meditative durations of building before the pieces come crashing down. “I probably shot 500 to 600 hours... maybe more.”