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FILM FEST KNOX Announces American Regional Film Competition Selections for Second Edition
Following its inaugural edition last year, Knoxville, Tennessee's FILM FEST KNOX returns for its second year from November 14 to 17. Here are the five films announced for this year's American Regional Cinema Competition, the winner of which will receive an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in Regal Entertainment's cinemas. From the press release: The directors of the competition films—Vera Brunner-Sung, Tracie Laymon, Nicholas Colia, Brandon Colvin, and Kelsey Taylor—will be in attendance, along with additional cast and crew, who will introduce the films, participate in Q&As, and discuss the current state and future of regional cinema. Collectively, these filmmakers have screened at many of the world’s premiere festivals, including Sundance, South by Southwest, Tribeca, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Indie Lisboa, and Melbourne. Bitterroot… Read more
“The Budgetary Challenges of Getting a Dead Squirrel Puppet”: DP Sam Davis on Dìdi
Izaac Wang in Dìdi
In the opening scene of Dìdi, the titular 13-year-old and his friends film themselves blowing up a mailbox and making a run for it while laughing hysterically. It perfectly encapsulates director Sean Wang’s view of adolescence as “the worst version of yourself, having the best time of your life.” Set in 2008 in Wang’s hometown of Fremont, California, the coming-of-age story follows a Taiwanese American teen during his final summer before high school. Though not strictly autobiographical, the film was inspired by Wang’s own adolescence and the making of it was awash in familiarity. The main character’s bedroom scenes were shot in the director’s own childhood room. His grandmother plays a prominent role, one of many first time Bay Area actors… Read more
TIFF 2024: The Gesuidouz, Sad Jokes, The Future
Sad Jokes
A standard festival story: I had plans to see a particular film at the end of TIFF 2024 day one, but my schedule had to be hastily rearranged, I had time to kill and thought I might as well see a movie I was kind of curious about. So there I sat at the P&I screening of Kenichi Ugana’s Midnight Madness world premiere The Gesuidouz, sandwiched between two independent theater bookers having a catch-up. The man on my left started reeling off every anime he’d programmed for the last two months and would be showing for the foreseeable future; the one on my right cut him off with “I think your knowledge of anime is far greater than mine and… Read more
“We Ascribe this Cuteness to Older Women”: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch
Kathleen Chalfant in Familiar Touch
Depicting aging and diminishing mental acuity, with increasing candor about same, essentially has become its own subgenre—the drama of descent or disappearance. Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch feels like something different, eschewing the conventions of linear decline to stay rooted in the present-tense bodily experience of its protagonist: Ruth Goldman, played by a galvanizing Kathleen Chalfant. Beyond the subjective design of the filmmaking—comprising not just what we hear, but how we understand the premise of any given scene—this is a catalyzing collaboration between Chalfant, storied veteran of both stage (Wit) and screen, and Friedland, a student of choreography who sought out a movement-based approach to the subject matter. Chalfant’s Ruth is a sharp, witty, appealingly regal writer of cookbooks; the actor has… Read more
TIFF 2024: Cloud, The End
Tilda Swinton in The End
Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of ripped-off customers who band together to take disproportionately bloody revenge. Kurosawa divides this 123-minute work into two very differently paced… Read more
“The Process Was More Important Than the Result”: My First Film Star Odessa Young, Back To One, Episode 308
Odessa Young is only 26, but she already has a truly impressive body of work behind her. Assassination Nation, A Million Little Pieces, Shirley, Mothering Sunday, The Stand, The Staircase, Manodrome, in each of these projects, she seems to have an effortless command over her character, each unique, never forced, always true. Now she stars as Vita, the lead character based on Zia Anger in My First Film. On this episode, she talks about the need to “cultivate an obsession” as character preparation, recent musings on “how much an actor should act to the camera,” why she never worries about being misinterpreted, the importance of “kindredness with creators,” and much more. My First Film is currently streaming on MUBI. Back To… Read more
“It Sounded Like a Good Title”: Jeremy Saulnier on Rebel Ridge
Jeremy Saulnier on the set of Rebel Ridge
In Jeremy Saulnier’s breakthrough films Blue Ruin and Green Room, the writer-director thrust protagonists into violent cacophonies they weren’t equipped to navigate. With his new Netflix actioner Rebel Ridge, Saulnier centers his story on a hero much more adept at meeting force with force. The film stars Aaron Pierre as a Marine hand-to-hand combat expert who comes to a small southern town to bail out his cousin. Before he can do so, his bail money is confiscated by the corrupt, militarized local police force (led by chief Don Johnson) via a bogus civil asset forfeiture claim. Confrontations—both verbal and physical—ensue. Rebel Ridge had a difficult path to completion. The original start date of April 2020 was scrapped shortly before production began by… Read more
