Christopher Munch launched his third feature, Backward Looks, Far Corners, this past fall by shooting a week’s worth of scenes with Martha Plimpton, who stars in the film with Jacqueline Bisset. Plimpton plays a Wall Street lawyer who was given up for adoption at birth by Bisset, a fifty-ish San Francisco divorcée troubled by a cancer diagnosis. The film’s a lyrical and complex tale that weaves parallel developments in both women’s lives as each responds to a sudden, unaccountable longing to seek out the other; Munch calls it a "story of reflection and reckoning."

Munch and producers Andrea Sperling and Ruth Charny are using the cut scenes from last fall’s shoot to attract equity investors before the remainder of principal photography in L.A., San Francisco, New York and Daytona Beach begins later this summer.

Heralded as a rare original for his 60-minute ’92 debut, the "John Lennon-in-Barcelona" fantasia The Hours and Times, Munch delivered an equally iconoclastic feature, Color Of A Brisk and Leaping Day, in ’96. While his first film, positing a relationship between Lennon and Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, fit obliquely into an emerging queer cinema, his second evoked comparisons to Francis Ford Coppola and Terrence Malick. He developed Backward Looks, Far Corners, with the help of an IFP/West $20,000 SWATCH Someone to Watch Award.

In addition to Sperling, who produced Color Of a Brisk and Leaping Day, and Charny, who was an exec producer, Munch’s new film also reunites him with Michael Stipe, the REM frontman who made his acting debut in the earlier pic. This time Stipe’s involved through C-100 Film Corp, the indie banner in which he’s partnered with Girls Town director Jim McKay.

Though Color Of A Brisk and Leaping Day and The Hours and Times were acclaimed for their sumptuous black-and-white cinematography, d.p. Rob Sweeny is shooting this time in 35mm color. So far the project has been funded entirely through private equity investment, and all rights are available.

Principal Cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Martha Plimpton, Nick Stahl, Marcia Gay Harden. Crew: Producers, Andrea Sperling, Christopher Munch; Executive Producer, Ruth Charny; Screenwriter/Director, Christopher Munch; Director of Photography, Rob Sweeny; N.Y. Line Producer, Per Melita; Casting, Kerry Barden. A presentation of Antarctic Pictures and C-Hundred Film Corp. Contact: Christopher Munch, Fort Washington LLC, 7110 Woodrow Wilson Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90068. Tel/Fax: (213) 874-2407.

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A Good Baby - Katherine Dieckmann
The Joyriders - Bruce Battersby
Park Day - Sterling Macer, Jr.
Roberta - Eric Mandelbaum
Sally - David Goldsmith
Spring Forward - Tom Gillroy