NEW YORK, NY.- After a festival run that began with its world premiere at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, Keri Pickett’s Uncle Roy will have its New York City premiere at NewFest, New York’s largest LGBTQ+ film festival, on Sunday, October 18 at 6:45 p.m. at SVA Theatre.
The feature-length documentary traces the extraordinary life of Roy Blakey, Pickett’s uncle, whose career moved between military service, international ice shows, photography and one of the world’s largest archives devoted to theatrical figure skating. In his final years, as Blakey developed severe dementia, Pickett became his caregiver while racing to preserve the photographs, documents and objects that recorded nearly a century of personal and cultural history.
Born in Oklahoma in 1930, Blakey became fascinated by figure skating as a child after seeing Olympic champion Sonja Henie in the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade. With no ice rink available to him in Enid, Oklahoma, he initially turned to roller skating, while beginning what would become a lifelong collection of skating memorabilia.
That collection eventually grew to approximately 44,000 objects, including programs, photographs, posters, costumes and skates. Blakey spent 15 years performing professionally in ice shows during the 1950s and 1960s, traveling internationally with productions including Holiday on Ice. His collection, later known as the IceStage Archive, became a record of a spectacular branch of entertainment history that might otherwise have disappeared.
Yet Uncle Roy reveals another, less publicly known chapter of his life.
After his skating career, Blakey became a photographer in New York, where his lens moved between actors, dancers, performers and members of the city’s queer community. Among the figures he photographed were Debbie Allen, Shirley MacLaine, Kay Ballard, Divine, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling.
His male nudes, made during the 1970s in his Manhattan studio and on Fire Island, pushed into territory that remained socially and artistically charged at the time. They appeared in publications including Mandate and After Dark and were exhibited at venues including the Leslie-Lohman Gallery and the Continental Baths. His 1972 book HE, little known even within his own family for years, eventually helped Pickett understand why Blakey had come to be regarded as a significant early figure in gay photography.
Pickett herself barely knew her uncle while growing up. Their relationship deepened after she graduated from college and followed him to New York to pursue photography. Living in the East Village, she began working for The Village Voice and documenting the cultural life of the city during the 1980s.
Their professional and personal paths became increasingly intertwined. Following a medical crisis that brought Pickett to Minneapolis, Blakey eventually joined her there, and the two shared a photography studio. Years later, Pickett discovered a box containing HE, an encounter that helped set in motion her effort to bring his photographic archive back into public view.
Many of the men Blakey photographed belonged to a generation devastated by the AIDS epidemic. Reintroducing those portraits consequently became more than an exercise in recovering an individual artist’s career: it became a way of returning faces, bodies and histories to a cultural record from which many had disappeared.
Built from nine decades of professional and family archives, Uncle Roy combines that recovery project with an intimate account of caregiving. As Blakey entered his 90s and developed hallucinatory dementia, Pickett became his full-time caregiver. The film follows her efforts to preserve both his photographic work and the vast figure-skating archive while confronting the practical and emotional realities of elder care and the end of life.
“With UNCLE ROY, I reveal my heart in a way I have never done,” Pickett said. “This film intimately documents the beautiful last years of our life together. I couldn’t be more excited and proud to premiere the film at NewFest in New York City, where Roy began his professional photography career that illuminated the LGBTQ+ community.”
Blakey died at his Minneapolis home on August 23, 2024, at the age of 94. His death added another layer of urgency to a film already concerned with memory, disappearance and preservation.
The documentary has since traveled widely on the festival circuit. It was selected for the Provincetown International Film Festival, Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival and Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, where it received the Audience Choice award for Documentary Feature. It also received honors at the 2026 Outshine LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
For Pickett, preserving Blakey’s legacy also means confronting a larger question: who is responsible for protecting the histories of people and communities whose records have often survived through private collections rather than major institutions?
The film places Blakey’s photographs alongside his collecting impulse, suggesting that both grew from the same desire to hold on to things that might otherwise vanish. Photographs preserve individuals; archives preserve performances, careers and communities. Together, they turn Uncle Roy into a film not only about one man but about the precariousness of cultural memory.
Pickett describes Blakey as a formative influence on her own work as a photographer and filmmaker. Her earlier feature The Fabulous Ice Age explored a century of theatrical skating through Blakey’s archive, but when that film failed to secure a permanent home for the collection, she continued filming. What began as a record of his archive gradually became an intimate portrait of their relationship.
“If you can see it, you can be it,” Pickett recalls Blakey believing. For her, the phrase came to describe both his approach to life and the inheritance he passed on to her as an artist.
Pickett’s documentary credits include Finding Her Beat (2022), First Daughter and the Black Snake (2017) and The Fabulous Ice Age (2013). Her work as a photographer has appeared in publications including Life, Time, People, Stern and Geo, and she has received fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Uncle Roy was produced and directed by Pickett, who also served as director of photography. Dawn Mikkelson is producer, editor and additional cinematographer. Original music is by Me-Lee Hay, with Marc Smolowitz serving as consulting producer and Doug Blush as consulting editor.
The New York City premiere of Uncle Roy takes place Sunday, October 18 at 6:45 p.m. at SVA Theatre as part of NewFest.
