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“Foreign Aid for American Indies”: US in Progress 2024
The Scout Here’s a funny thing to think about: One of the best places to get a handle on what’s happening in American (and sometimes Canadian) independent film is a very long travel day away from New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, a millennium-old city with a historic Old Town. Adjacent is the very modern cineplex New Horizons, which shares its name with a sprawling summer festival and each November also hosts AFF and its industry-only sidebar, US in Progress.
Described by one attendee as “foreign aid for American indies,” USIP has, over its 14 years, fostered the efforts of a generation or two of North American filmmakers on-the-verge. Alumni include Amy Seimetz, Adele Romanski, Lucy Kerr, Nathan Silver, Isabel Sandoval, Jennifer Reeder, Jack Dunphy, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Jane Schoenbrun, Amanda Kramer, Joel Potrykus, Mike Ott and Matt Porterfield, among many others.
The program enjoyed an exceptionally robust 2023 edition that anticipated some of this year’s indie success stories, like India Donaldson’s Good One, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch (which won for best debut, best director and best actress in Venice) and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. All three films were back for American Film Festival screenings. Meanwhile, a total of nine new projects were in the mix for prizes in excess of $200,000, from in-kind services offered by Polish post-production houses to the $50,000 Polish Film Institute Award.
That cash prize made a big difference for Good One, which won last year. Beyond the obvious financial boost, the award drew vital attention to the film, a delicately nuanced drama about a young Brooklyn woman on a camping trip gone weird with her father and his best friend, in which crucial meaning is articulated between glances and lines. “There was a really beautiful article that came out, I think in Variety—an interview with India, and she was super-articulate, really thoughtful,” said producer Sarah Winshall. “It was early, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the movie, but the article became a calling card.” Winshall has landed multiple projects at USIP, including Schoenbaum’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Kramer’s Give Me Pity! and, this year, By Design, a colorful, surreal musical in which star Juliette Lewis swaps identities with … an extremely fetching chair. This year, she also co-founded the Los Angeles Festival of Movies and finds a unifying thread that ties together all her disparate productions, made by writer-directors with intensely clear and focused perspectives. “The point of these kinds of movies is that you get to take creative risks,” she said. “You get to [take] a little bit [of a] big swing with how you’re making the movie.”
USIP reflected that spirit in a wide range of selections. Some were acutely personal. Under the Lights, a debut from writer-director Miles Levin, won the Polish Film Institute prize with an autobiographical drama about an adolescent driven to attend his high school prom even though exposure to bright lights may trigger an epileptic seizure. The film, expanded from an earlier short, was developed through Levin’s association with Vanishing Angle, the production company co-founded by Jim Cummings (Thunder Road), where he worked as an intern and workshopped in the company’s weekly writer’s group. Natalie Metzger, vice president of development and production, came on as a producer in 2022—when Levin was part of the Tribeca Festival’s Untold Stories lab, where the project won $50,000 as the fan favorite—and helped launch pre-production. From there, through various means, the production built a cast that includes Nick Offerman, Mark Duplass, Lake Bell and Randall Park, all supporting the lead performance of Pearce Joza, the star of Levin’s original 2020 short. “This is the ‘little project that could.’ Each step of the way, we’ve been very lucky just being like, ‘Oh, you know, we want to do it this way, and that’s going to make it so much better.’ But we don’t know if we have the resources be able to pull it off,” Metzger said. “It’s almost like a homegrown project.”
The Wroclaw gathering was an opportunity to go behind the scenes of several of the films, which were screened for industry participants in 20-minute excerpts. The story behind Erupcja, a new film from Pete Ohs—whose zombified rom-com-gone-wrong Jethica was a previous USIP selection—illustrates how a random encounter can still make movie magic. A collaboration with playwright, screenwriter and actor Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play, Zola), as well as a love letter to Ohs’ recently adoptive home of Warsaw, the film stars pop diva Charli XCX in one of several productions the “Brat Summer” propagator has signed onto. In something of a coup, it marks the singer’s first lead role in a feature, opposite Polish actress Lena Góra.
Ohs met Harris in 2016, when the playwright offered “great notes” on a rough cut of his first narrative feature. More recently, Ohs edited Harris’s directorial feature debut, Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. “As we got to know each other through collaborating, we recognized how much we liked collaborating,” Ohs said. Last year, the pair teamed up on what IMDB lists as Untitled Tick Movie, which Ohs directed and Harris produced, co-wrote and acts in—roles he also plays in Erupcja. In May, Ohs and Harris met up for late-night drinks at Clandestino, in Harris’ Chinatown neighborhood. “We’re just like, what’s the next thing?” Ohs recalled. “And, once again, the stars kind of aligned.” Rather literally: Sometime after 3 a.m., Charli XCX walked in. “Jeremy and Charlie have their own long history together,” Ohs continued. “He brings her over to our table. We’re all hanging out, and we start talking about making low budget independent movies, and this is enticing to her. This sounds like a fun thing she wants to do.”
Harris suggests that we shouldn’t be surprised. “I mean, the thing that a lot of men don’t know about Charlie is that she is a cinephile,” he said. “A deep cinephile. When she’s not writing a song, she’s watching, and what was really cool was that I just told her about Pete’s filmmaking because I wanted to break the ice between these two friends of mine who I respect a lot who come from two very different worlds, right? The minute they started talking about movies, I no longer had a space in the conversation.”
Shot during a two-week window in August, Erupcja began with the scarcest of plot elements. “There was going to be a character that spoke Polish, and there was going to be a character that didn’t,” Ohs said. Also: an erupting volcano, which supplies the title and serves as a plot device. Despite its star dominating the pop charts and arenas all summer, the production itself didn’t explode. “It was like ‘No, no, no, let’s keep doing that thing that had felt good during that first conversation,’” Ohs said, “and that’s what we held on to and did.” The same attitude guided the entire production, which followed the on-the-fly creative process Ohs has cultivated across multiple features. “There is no reason to find a no when a yes is a much kinder thing to find,” Harris said. “And that was the ethos of making this movie in two and a half months.”
Bunnylovr, the debut feature from writer-actor-director Katarina Zhu, also benefits from a notable friendship, in this case with New York University Tisch School of the Arts classmate Rachel Sennott. Through her, Zhu’s emotionally complex film about a Chinese-American cam girl reached Neon Heart Productions, a producer of Shiva Baby, Sennott’s breakthrough film with director Emma Seligman, as well as such previous USIP standouts as Monica Sorelle’s Mountains and Haroula Rose’s Once Upon a River—projects that matched the outfit’s commitment to early-career female filmmakers. “So much of the independent film scene right now runs on community support and sharing resources and going within your circle,” said Neon Heart’s Tristan Scott-Behrends, who represented Bunnylovr in Wroclaw. “I saw Emma and Rachel go through the process of making Shiva Baby, and then I had friends who were interning at Elara [Pictures, the Safdie Brothers production company],” said Zhu, whose character, amid a romantic breakup, pivots between an increasingly strange client who gifts her a pet bunny, and her estranged father, who is dying. “There was so much encouragement from everybody to be making our own stuff … I was auditioning a lot as an actor and not gaining much traction. I felt like I had no autonomy creatively over my career.” While Zhu taps into complicated family relationships from her own life, the story also is rooted in emotional ties made wirelessly. “I feel like I grew up online and found a lot of connection in digital spaces,” she said. “That’s why I was interested in exploring that sort of relationship. I returned to my eighth grade self. I was constantly on my computer, sort of in my bed all day.”
Much as Zhu experienced as a Tisch grad, collegiate bonds also fortified The Scout, the debut feature from writer-director Paula Gonzalez-Nasser, whose Brooklyn-based team comprises a roster of fellow alumni of Florida State University’s film school (which also graduated Barry Jenkins and the core of his Moonlight crew). It’s the same loose assortment of talents that assembled producer Ryan Martin Brown’s comedy Free Time and Justin Zuckerman’s Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater. “We can’t pay everybody equitable rates,” Gonzalez-Nasser said, “but we can all help each other produce each other’s work, and we can trade positions in that way, because we’ve all worn different hats from learning that in school.” The Scout draws from the filmmaker’s experiences working as a location scout for Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Brooklyn-centric comedies Broad City, High Maintenance and Search Party: “None of the scenes that happen in the film are carbon-copied from things that I experienced, but they’re definitely inspired by a few people that I always kept in the back of my mind because they were such characters. I would always leave those appointments [thinking] that felt like such an interesting scene, where it had a beginning, a middle and an end, and there was such a weight to those interactions that I thought would be interesting to fictionalize.”
Sabrina Greco’s microbudget comedy Lockjaw explores the possibilities in what Lars Von Trier would call an “obstruction.” “I had the idea that it would be cool to work with a trained actor that has some kind of handicap that they’re working with and seeing how that would affect a big performance,” said Greco, whose debut feature stars busy indie performer Blu Hunt as a volatile young woman who has to get her jaw wired after a drunk driving accident. Hunt wears a dental prosthetic that makes intelligible speech a challenge, but also a comic opportunity in a plot that unfolds over a very long night. “I thought it would be interesting to have the character acting out and speaking a lot,” continued the filmmaker, whose recent credits include co-editing Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code.
Working with producer Abbie Jones (an associate producer of 2023 USIP selection We Strangers), who secured the Eagle Rock home of artist friends for eight days of shooting, Greco also brought in a crew of friends first met at Boston University, and with whom she’s collaborated since they all moved to Los Angeles together, forming the collective Video Expert. It’s a busy gang. Cinematographer and co-editor Neal Wynne’s feature debut The Trick premiered at Baltimore’s New/Next Film Festival, where programmer Eric Hatch called it “a microbudgeted dream-logic comedy-noir in the lineage of Mulholland Drive and Under the Silver Lake.” “It’s just being crafty with all the resources you have,” Greco said. “You have to look at what’s in front of you and think to some degree ‘OK, what can I do with XYZ?”
