Authors — Sarah Salovaara
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Trailer Watch: Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly
A couple years ago, there was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the distribution trials behind Jonathan Levine’s first film, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which changed hands four times before finally seeing a release seven years following its TIFF premiere. About Elly, Asghar Farhadi’s Silver Bear-winning precursor to A Separation, experienced a similar quagmire when its original distributor, Here Films, went out of business. Thankfully, some six years later, Cinema Guild has untangled the rights issues and is now distributing the film on its original 35mm print. Check out the trailer above.
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 9, 2015 -
Watch: Objects and Objectification in the Films of Walerian Borowcyzk
Currently ongoing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is the Walerian Borowcyzk series, Obscure Pleasures, and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca fashioned a nice film essay to supplement the occasion. The above video considers how Borowcyzk’s animation background influenced his treatment of objects, which he often imbues with lifelike or plot-reflecting properties. In the opening film of the series, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, a phonograph is partially responsible for the third act climax. Lucca also considers the filmmaker’s disregard for shot-reverse-shot construction and his dedication to portraying female sexuality in a series of fairly NSFW clips.
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 7, 2015 -
In Conversation: The Second Annual Treefort Film Festival
About halfway through my viewing at the Treefort Film Festival – predominately spent lounging on burlap sacks and church pews, repurposed for the inside of a tent – an anomalous, entirely welcome, framework began to take shape. At most regional festivals, the program tends to be a rather mixed bag, with titles culled from disparate, big name destinations, void of the necessary context for a non-industry crowd. But at the Boise-based, 2nd annual Treefort, the relatively compact, thoughtful selection of shorts and features appeared to be in constant dialogue with one another. Take, for instance, the standing-room-only double feature of Scott Cummings’ Buffalo […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 3, 2015 -
Watch: Chris Landreth’s Subconscious Password
Conde Nast’s short form original content and acquisitions site, The Scene, has just released the fantastic short Subconscious Password, from Academy Award winning animator Chris Landreth. Landreth stars in the Sundance 2014 premiering film as a man who has trouble recalling an acquaintance’s name at a cocktail party, and retreats into an inner mind game show in an attempt to drum up the correct direct address. Though you can’t quite enjoy the 3-D film as it was meant to be seen online, it’s still a rather inventive head trip.
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 2, 2015 -
Watch: Tony Zhou on F For Fake and How to Structure a Film
“‘Therefore’ and ‘but;’ ‘meanwhile’ and ‘back at the ranch.’” Those are two storytelling axioms to keep in mind, suggests Tony Zhou, when structuring both a film and a video essay. Drawing on Orson Welles’ F For Fake, as well as the words of Alfred Hitchcock and Trey Parker, Zhou demonstrates how the juggling of parallel ideas and story lines are essential to any convincing film or argument.
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 31, 2015 -
Five Questions with God Bless the Child Directors Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at the Atlanta Film Festival over the weekend, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s God Bless the Child is a naturalistic, quotidian portrait of five children roaming the streets and marshes of Davis, California after their mother skips town. Machoian and Ojeda-Beck capture their characters with both formal remove and striking intimacy, as their interplay suggests the nature of young bodies left to their own devices. Though the Grahams — Harper, Elias, Arri, Ezra, and Jonah — exist in the film without any parental supervision, all five happen to belong to co-director Machoian, a relation which the pair were […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 30, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope
Here is a bizarre entry in the contemporary trailer cannon: a one minute plus edit that gives almost no insight into the narrative happenings of the film it depicts, jettisoning specificity for internet topicality. The argument, I guess, is you can glean something about Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope from the execution on display, but I’m inclined to think that with all the memes involved, this is an eye-grabbing attempt more than anything else. The film, which earned raves at Sundance — with the notable exception of Wesley Morris — opens June 19 from Open Road.
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 26, 2015 -
“An Auteur Film with Pseudo-Anonymous Dialogue”: Benjamin Crotty on Fort Buchanan
A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect. Buchanan unfolds at the titular army base, where husbands and wives lay in waiting for their men overseas, though the wives tend to occupy their time by attempting to seduce the gay husbands, or the temperamental daughter of the film’s most lovelorn protagonist, Roger (Andy Gillet). If something is askew in the characters’ roving dialogue, that’s because the script is entirely adapted from American TV shows, an off-kilter choice that finds a counterpart in Crotty’s cinematic language, in which seasonal set changes are ushered in […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 24, 2015 -
Watch: “You and I and You” by Terence Nance
Though Terence Nance has been quiet on the feature front since An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, he’s been regularly churning out short films and music videos. Brandon Harris called his recent “magic-realist-tinged” Rotterdam entry Swimming in Your Skin Again “astoundingly beautiful” and “sublime,” and his latest music video, for Oversimplification collaborators The Dig, conveys a similar conflation of the concrete and surreal. It opens with a young family being trailed by a collective of dancers, and only takes off from there. Watch it above.
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 20, 2015 -
“Like Reading a Diary You Wrote as a Teenager”: Britni West on Tired Moonlight
Since taking home the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, most reviews have charged Britni West’s naturalistic narrative Tired Moonlight with the “documentary-like” or “hybrid” stamp of approval, but more than anything else, the film seems to suggest that such classifications were meant to be broken. An interwoven portrait of the inhabitants and topography of Kalispell, Montana, West collapses the conventions of an ensemble driven film by allowing her characters to roam free, presenting a beautiful, like-minded series of vignettes that form a cohesive whole. Recently back from Austin where she presented the film at RxSM (along with 7 Chinese Brothers at SXSW, on which she […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 18, 2015
