The teaser for Kali Kahn’s film, Fairchild, is a murky thing, dark but patchy with light, too, because this is Florida. A young girl, pale and denim-shorted, digs a hole in the dirt, uprooting the tendriled root of a tree in the Everglades. She chews the ends of her hair and her fingers, the way children do, the way teenagers do (she’s both or somewhere in-between). The clearing is saw palmetto green; her nails are blue, bluer still in the soil, on her own shoulder, on her lips. There is neither antecedent nor aftermath for the scene—it’s the film’s trailer, […]

The trailer for this year’s Third Horizon Film Festival—the third Third Horizon, as time would have it—was beautiful, because the films comprising it are beautiful: wide-eyed children, skin aglow with flames, the massive, lime-green expanse of sugarcane fields, a sea coursing like blood. The preview’s song begins with a dissonant, bell-like din, stretched like sinew over the rest of the track, which moves a lot like, actually, waves: steel drums clanging like a ticking clock; keys that progress upward, then down, till the whole song heads somewhere melancholic, toward a wisp of its former self. Third Horizon Film Festival is […]

I read a book on architecture and design in the subtropics, once, a long time ago, that described the region as inherently cozy. Palm trees and big-leafed plants, it said, are made for hiding; enough of them, bundled together, will look like home. Tiquan, the thirteen-year-old narrator of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s directorial debut, Dadli, has places to hide, the way teenagers need to. “I go far in the country,” he says. “Hunt, get high — nobody troubles me.” Dadli, a brief and searing documentary portrait of Antigua, where Kirchner grew up, is as short as Tiquan is young, but it […]