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Exclusive: Watch a Clip of the LAFM World Premiere Drinking and Driving
Co-directors Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank co-star in Drinking and Driving, a lo-fi hangout film for the fuck-ups. Filmmaker is happy to share an exclusive clip of the film, which will have its world premiere at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies on Saturday, April 11. Fast and Frank add that “Drinking and Driving is the trip you didn’t ask for, to the hometown you didn’t grow up in.”
Fast previously helmed the homespun yet audacious features Honeycomb and CAMP, which explore grisly, supernatural aspects of girlhood and on which Frank closely collaborated. Fast has also been working with a slew of rising, boundary-pushing filmmakers, including Louise Weard on her transgressive Castration Movie series, and most recently starred in prolific 21-year-old filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s Buffy-inspired The Serpent’s Skin.
Now skewing more realistically raw, Drinking and Driving was filmed in several separate hometowns of the cast and crew of Canadian 20-somethings. As a result, the film feels entrenched in the stagnant, stubborn haze of youthful nescience. The parties don’t end, the consequences don’t come, the lessons are never learned—or at least it starts to feel that way.
The loose plotline, which does indeed feature the dangerous and illicit title activity, is outlined below.
Early twenties Iris (Jillian Frank) and Palmer (Avalon Fast) never left their hometown. They work at the same restaurant, share the same bed, and both have a habit of drinking and driving. They run into Levi (Ethan Hawksworth), a guy they used to know. They spend time with him and his cousin, Phoenix (Henri Gillespi), in cars, backyards, and other people’s bedrooms. When Levi shares a dream he had with Iris, things change between the four of them. The reality of the summer becomes faded, the parties die. The four end in a field of unified confusion.
“Do you guys remember the first time you ever day drank?” Palmer asks her friends in the minute and a half-long clip as they blast music in a car. They take swigs from a quarter pint of liquor, giggling and slurring their words before doing donuts in a deserted dirt lot. The handheld cinematography by Jacob Glickman evokes digital aesthetics of yore, making it easy for viewers across several generations (at least to a degree) to project their own personal memories of reckless abandon.
More festivals and release details from Muscle Distribution to be announced soon.
