The big sale — to Apple for a reported $15 million — of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Cha Cha Real Smooth is writer, director and lead actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, SHITHOUSE. Again essaying a twentysomething young man navigating the indeterminate period before real life and real romance takes hold, Cha Cha Real Smooth finds Raiff’s character, Andrew, working a dead-end fast-food job while working side gigs as a bar mitzvah party starter and babysitter. When he demonstrates a rapport with a 12-year-old autistic girl (Vanessa Burghardt), her mother, Domino (played by Dakota Johnson, also a […]

Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 SXSW winner Shithouse follows a recent alum who, unable to find a career path, moves back home and begins to work as a party-starter for his younger brother’s classmates. When he befriends a local’s mom, he begins to imagine a different future for himself. Editor Henry Hayes balancing humor and pathos and how working with friends and on small projects gave him space to experiment. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hayes: […]

The last two years have prompted much contemplation and reconsideration of the reasons why we make our films as well as the ways in which we make them. What aspect of your filmmaking—whether in your creative process, the way you finance your films, your production methodology or the way you relate to your audience—did you have to reinvent in order to make and complete the film you are bringing to the festival this year? Cha Cha Real Smooth is the first movie I’ve made with a real production company, so it was all pretty new to me. I suppose I did […]

Cha Cha Real Smooth taps into generational angst with its story of Andrew, a recent university alum who finds himself moving in with his parents due to a lack of job prospects. Andrew catches a break when he finds work as a party-starter for bar and bat mitzvahs, where he finds himself yearning for a future that might not be his own. Cinematographer Cristina Dunlap discusses how she varied the look of each of the seven bar and bat mitzvahs and making an abandoned Pittsburgh mall stand-in for so many different locations. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]